Great Expectations: Mining State Level Data for Baseline Comparisons to Augment Randomized Experimental Designs
Our project's goal is to determine the effects of teacher professional development (PD) on student achievement by using a stratified randomized control/treatment experimental design. In the four years that we conducted our study we sought to discern any causal influence of the PD on student learning outcomes as measured by state standardized tests. However, during the course of this experiment a number of concurrent state, district, and school level initiatives were implemented that may have influenced student learning and/or test preparation. To understand the impact of these initiatives we used statewide data to generate a baseline of student growth in achievement to be used in addition to our control group to help inform us of our PD's efficacy. We also explored latent measures of student growth in achievement that may add to the assessment of PD.
