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Richard Prather

Alyn Turner

June 2008

The No Child Left Behind Act provides strong incentives to choose education policies and programs that work. Yet traditional educational research has rarely been designed with the goal of providing scientific evidence of “what works,” and relatively few educational researchers have been trained in how to do that kind of rigorous quantitatively sound research.

ITP Fellow Profile
Alyn Turner is a fourth year sociology student at UW-Madison and a third year ITP fellow. Her research is supported in part by funds from the National Science Foundation. Alyn is interning at Mathematica Policy Research Institute. At a recent noontime brown bag meeting she discussed her internship, which so far has involved three research projects.

Alyn's first project explored 2005 DHHS Dietary Guidelines to identify and analyze the scientific basis for dietary recommendations for children. For this project, Alyn systematically reviewed scientific statements made by organizations such as the American Heart Association and the American Pediatrics Association and made assessments both about the process that each organization went through to gather evidence to support dietary recommendations for children and about the extent to which the recommendations were based on evidence on children or on adults.

The second project was an evaluation of Head Start Region III's implementation of “I am Moving, I am Learning,” a Choosy Kids, LLC initiative that aims to prevent childhood obesity and promote active learning. Alyn analyzed qualitative interviews with Head Start program directors, teachers, and parents of Head Start children to develop logic models to describe variations among program implementation of IM/IL within classrooms.

The third project Alyn was involved with was an impact study a community center program designed to target orphaned and vulnerable children in Zambia. This intervention aims to improve the well-being of orphans and other vulnerable children ages 8-19 and to increase the percentage of children attending school. Alyn's role on the project was to develop a detailed codebook for researchers analyzing quantitative data from two surveys previously administered in the community.

Alyn's internship experience included in-depth discussions about program evaluation in a randomized trial setting. Specifically, in her work with the IM/IL implementation study, she analyzed data on how programs were using the IM/IL initiative. This information will be used to design a randomized trail of the impact of IM/IL participation on reducing obesity rates among Head Start participants.

Alyn says her experience at Mathematica was eye-opening. “I was able to see how research is done in a non-academic setting. The main differences included the focus on pleasing the client with rigorous and well-designed studies that address the client's concern and the quick turn-around of projects that have strict deadlines and budget constraints. There was also a focus on working with teams of researchers who bring distinct expertise to the project. These teams change with each project, giving each researcher the opportunity to work with many people from different disciplines over the course of a year.”

Alyn says she also benefited by gaining a better understanding of the different settings in which research can be done. “That clarified for me that students may want to expand their career considerations to include policy research firms in addition to the option of working in the academy,” she says. “Research done in non-academic settings is equally exciting and rigorous, albeit done with less autonomy.”

Alyn's internship experience gave her exposure to the option of working for a company like Mathematica in the future and experience with the potential trade-offs that are made choosing one type of career over another.

WCER’s Interdisciplinary Training Program (ITP) in the Education Sciences is preparing a new generation of scholars who can provide solid evidence of “what works” in education.

Supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the ITP focuses on two related themes: designing and implementing field-based randomized studies in schools and other complex, real-world settings; and statistical analysis of quantitative data (from surveys, observations, and assessments) on education, with special attention to questions of causal inference.

ITP Fellows come from several disciplines, including sociology, economics, psychology, political science, and social welfare. Working with more than 25 scholars from across campus, they receive specialized academic, professional, and financial supports and field research opportunities.

ITP Fellow Richard Prather brings training in Brain and Cognitive Sciences to his current studies of the mechanisms of learning in human cognition. He focuses on arithmetic learning, including arithmetic principles, concepts, and problem-solving strategies. With UW-Madison education professor Martha Alibali, Prather published a study of adults’ knowledge of principles of arithmetic with negative numbers. They investigated the links between knowledge of principles and problem representation. In their recent study, participants who displayed greater knowledge of principles of arithmetic with a negative number were more likely to set up equations that involved negative numbers. The study found that participants’ knowledge or arithmetic principles was related to their problem representation.

 “The ITP program has very much enhanced my ability to conduct education related research, Prather says. “They have very generously provided funding for
attending several research conferences. This allows me to present my research to education researchers and to form collaborations for future work. Given the very broad nature of education research, these sort of collaborations are very beneficial to producing innovative education research.”

ITP students fulfill the requirements of their disciplinary departments and are firmly grounded in the theoretical and methodological tools of their respective disciplines, including advanced statistics. Within this framework, the ITP program allows students and their mentors to craft individualized experiences that meet the students’ interests and their disciplinary requirements.

Fellows’ doctoral dissertations emphasize questions that are theoretically informed and stimulated by practical concerns, says ITP Director Adam Gamoran. Their work attends to issues of causal inference, through randomized field trials, quasi-experimental studies, and/or rigorous statistical adjustments to non-experimental data.

Entry-level students are in their first or second year of graduate study and receive up to five years of funding. Advanced students like Prather entered ITP as dissertators and will complete their dissertations within two years after entry. They receive up to two years of funding.

Internships
All entry-level students serve an internship on a large-scale randomized controlled trial in education. Typically occurring in the students’ 3rd year in the program, the internship supports their development as independent researchers.

Two kinds of internships are available. One involves spending a semester at a research institute like Mathematica Policy Research. The student participates in a variety of randomized trials, selecting from projects that best align with their personal research interests. Students see many projects in many different phases: Some are at the design phase, some are in the coding phase, some in the analysis phase. They get a sense of the cycles projects go through. Exposure to the corporate culture at a place like Mathematica provides an insight into a non academic working environment.

As an alternative, Fellows may choose to intern with UW-Madison faculty researcher on a WCER project. One student, for example, is doing data analysis for a Los Angeles-based  elementary science research project that’s being evaluated by faculty members Adam Gamoran and Geoffrey Borman. Another student will work on a randomized trial in Milwaukee with WCER’s value-added research project. Another is studying the political participation of parents whose children attend an after-school program called Families and Schools Together, which builds social capacity among parents. Research suggests that parents who are more engaged in the community are also more politically active.

Coursework
ITP students take courses and advising in education and other social science disciplines. They pursue a distributed minor in Education Sciences, consisting of four courses outside their home departments related to their scholarship on education.

For most students, the minor includes at least one course in experimental design, such as design of educational experiments; at least one course in measurement, such as test theory; and two courses in education in context, such as policy issues in educational assessment, professional development and organizational learning, seminar in the politics of education, and introduction to the learning sciences.

Through the minor courses and an interdisciplinary seminar, students work with a variety of faculty from outside their home departments. At least two members of the training program faculty sit on each student’s dissertation committee.

For more information see the ITP web site.