Research
Passage of the Evidence Act in July 2019 opened opportunities to integrate administrative data across agencies. For the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the Evidence Act this opportunity to broaden the context for NCES data bases expands the potential scope for education research... more
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has moved the distribution of its reports from paper to online. A benefit of this change is that new ways of displaying data in the reports are more easily available. For a start, the need for terseness is lessened, so that graphical displays can... more
The Covid-19 pandemic and the consequent changes to lifestyles and education practices have focused the American attention intensely on education and learning, both processes and progress. The shifts from in-classroom to virtual learning and from social to asocial learning and isolated environments... more
Now that most National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) assessments and surveys are conducted using electronic modes, electronic data capture means that in addition to basic background information and final responses, data includes documentation of the process of responding. These process... more
While the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) collects annually and maintains administrative data on all K-12 schools in the United States, there is no comparable collection of information on schools’ physical plant (buildings, grounds and other infrastructure necessary for each school... more
Most National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) assessments and surveys are now conducted using electronic modes. In consequence, the data captured include not only responses but also time-stamps and click-by-click chronicles of the response process. These data offer unique insight into the... more
The vigorous national dialogue about how to describe the “significance” of research findings that an NCES-NISS Expert Panel addressed in 2018 has shifted. No longer is it about whether to move away from dichotomizing results into “significant” or “non-significant” (e.g., p < 0.05) but rather... more
Education research has relied for over half a century on eligibility for free/reduced price lunch (FRL) as a primary indicator of a student’s socioeconomic status (SES). With changes in the regulation and the implementation of FRL practices, it is no longer a stable indicator with a universal and... more
For decades NCES has collected data on the state of education, nationally and internationally, via validated assessments, surveys, and collections of administrative data. Many NCS reports of these data focus on “significant” findings. The prime challenges facing NCES are: What to report as... more
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) conducted their first collection of administrative data on postsecondary education in 1966, almost immediately upon establishment of the Center, with continuing collections through today. The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS)... more
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) charged the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) with convening a panel of technical experts to examine the issues of clarity, consistency and effectiveness in reporting NCES study and survey results. NCES is perhaps most widely... more
Research Working Group
MoonJung Cho, PhD, US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics "Imputation at the BLS"
Cliff Spiegelman, PhD, Texas A & M University, Department of Statistics "Hitting Calibration Targets + INCA Calibration"
Jae Kwang Kim, PhD, Iowa State University, Department of... more
Surveys and data collections are in a time of flux in almost every aspect; and response rates are declining throughout the federal statistical agencies. Modes of communication are changing, population composition is shifting with new populations of interest emerging, and attitudes toward... more
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is continually challenged by the problems and the opportunities as data gathering and data analysis evolve with the rapidity of technological change. Problems include rising rates of non-response and increasing need to reduce response burden. An... more
Redesigning a survey presents a rare opportunity to consider all aspects of the survey from the perspectives of both the producer and user. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) charged the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) with convening a panel of technical experts... more
Summary
The NCES has progressed since the NAS report, advancing well beyond the challenges articulated in that report. However, we are in a time of rapid technological change, and every facet of education is evolving. NCES needs to remain current in documenting what is being taught/learned, how it... more
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The Triangle Census Research Network (TCRN), established by NISS and Duke University, develops broadly-applicable methodologies intended to transform and improve data dissemination practice in the federal statistical system. It focuses primarily on methods for (1) handling missing data and... more
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The Internet is rapidly becoming the main way people read and process information. The Internet requires additional reading, comprehension skills, beyond those needed for printed text. One dilemma is how do students discern what information is correct and what is incorrect?
NISS participated in a $... more
Data weights are constructed in order for statistical analyses of data to correctly represent results presented on a national scale, to accurately reflect the composition of the national population and to provide estimated standard errors for all reported statistics. The goal of this study was to... more
This white paper is intended to lay out for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) available algorithms and technology solutions for secure, principled statistical analysis of distributed data, as well as to identify gaps in our current understanding.
For concreteness, the following... more
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The Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) is a census of business establishments in the U.S. with paid employees that was developed by the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Bureau of the Census. It supports an active research agenda focusing on business entry and exit, gross employment flows,... more
The Technical Expert Panel (TEP) was convened to evaluate the quality and utility of the Teacher Compensation Survey (TCS). The TCS is a research and development effort to see whether or not it is possible and realistic to collect and publish teacher-level data from the administrative records that... more
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NISS and Duke University are collaborating on the Triangle Census Research Network (TCRN), one of eight research nodes that are working on the National Census Research Network (NCRN). NISS and Duke are looking at ways to improve how federal statistical (“FedStats”) agencies disseminate data to the... more
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Take yourself back to 1960. Despite the Cold War, it was a time of optimism in the United States.Our economy was booming, the industrial age was at its peak and we expected to continue our growth and prosperity. Civil rights and the Viet Nam war were still in the future.
In the spring of 1960, the... more
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Users of the nation’s road and highway network are increasingly dependent on estimates of travel times from where they are to where they want to go. Such information is available from traffic system managers and commercial sources, and multiple mechanisms ranging from variable message signs to GPS... more
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Syndromic surveillance uses syndrome (a specific collection of clinical symptoms) data to monitor for indications of a potential or incipient disease outbreak. Other advanced surveillance systems have been implemented globally for early detection of infectious disease outbreaks and bioterrorist... more
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Official statistics surveys face a constant tradeoff between data quality and cost, which is dictated by current and anticipated budget pressures. The World’s Simplest Survey Microsimulator (WSSM) was developed to work as a laboratory for survey scientists so they can try various scenarios out in... more
This compendium is an outgrowth of the Technical Expert Panel on Maps and Graphics organized in 2009 by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) on behalf of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
The purpose of the panel was to “assist the NCES [in] reviewing and... more
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) / National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS)
NCES/NISS convened a Technical Expert Panel (TEP) to review and make recommendations concerning NCES' Comparable Wage Index (CWI).
The CWI is a statistical tool developed by NCES for geographical... more
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Emerging OMICS technologies such as microarray and highthroughput screening have been adopted across a broad spectrum of applications as these technologies are capable of simultaneous measurements of very large numbers of channels. Thus they enable rapid experimental turnaround with an accompanying... more
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NISS has joined the Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer research initiative that focuses on technologies for cancer biomarker discovery. The overall goal is to foster the building of an integrated foundation of proteomic technologies, data, reagents and reference materials, and analysis... more
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NISS joined the Clinical Proteomic Technologies for Cancer research initiative that focuses on technologies for cancer biomarker discovery. The overall goal was to foster the building of an integrated foundation of proteomic technologies, data, reagents and reference materials, and analysis systems... more
This is the final report of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) Technical Panel on Configuration and Data Integration for Longitudinal Studies (hereafter, CDI).
The principal recommendations regarding configuration are as follows:
The National Center for Education Statistics (... more
The Postsecondary Choice Project was conducted by the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to address existing and emerging issues of postsecondary access and choice. The project culminated in a workshop held on 26 January 2009 at... more
Metadata and/or paradata accompany federal statistical agency data files to describe or define the data elements and the collection and processing of these data. Practices vary across the Statistical Community of Practice (SCOP). Distinctions between the two terms are not well-defined, and there... more
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Two postdoctoral fellows will work on research aspects of longitudinal analyses using the Survey of Doctoral Recipients and small domain estimation for several SRS surveys.According to the NSF website, "The Survey of Doctorate Recipients is a longitudinal biennial survey conducted since 1973 that... more
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Working through the Education Statistics Services Institute-Statistics (ESSI-Stat) and NAEP Education Statistics Services Institute (NESSI), NISS has convened a series of task forces to bring nationwide expertise to bear on problems of importance to the National Center for Education Statistics (... more
This white paper is an extended review of NCES’ annually issued report containing projections, exemplified by Hussar and Bailey (2008), from methodological (§3) as well as presentation (§2) perspectives.
While the paper contains criticisms, they are meant to be constructive, and are in no sense... more
The National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) established a Cross-Sector Research in Residence Program in partnership with the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), the survey and estimation arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This new collaborative venture by NISS and the... more
The goal of NAEP is to provide high-quality indicators of performance for well-defined populations of students enrolled in selected grades of U.S. schools. Under current NAEP protocols, some students with disabilities (SD) and some English language learners (ELL) may be excluded from assessment,... more
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One of the factors the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) looks for when evaluating a drug is the potential for that drug to induce a cardiac arrhythmia. When a drug is administered to a patient, some of them can interfere with the normal electrical signals of the heart. In a normal heartbeat, the... more
The purpose for convening this task force was to assist NCES in understanding the range of methods used currently for nonresponse bias analyses in its data collections, the criteria by which such methods are selected, and other available techniques for Non-Response Bias Analysis (NRBA), including... more
The Task Force was convened at ESSI in Washington, DC on December 11, 2006. Also present were NCES Chief Statistician Marilyn Seastrom and Special Assistant to the Commissioner Andrew White. Presentations to the Task Force were made by NCES staff members Chris Chapman, Bill Tirre and John Wirt.... more
The role of technology in education is expanding and changing. Decisions about the utilization of technology for K-12 learners are made variously by teachers, schools, and all levels of governance. Decisions are enabled by funders, by school boards and communities, by parents. At the same time,... more
The Task Force was convened to consider the utilization of Computer Adaptive Testing in NCES longitudinal studies in general and in HSLS-09 in particular. Computer Adaptive Testing (CAT) is distinguished by the adaptive selection of items for an individual test-taker based on previously collected... more
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The goal of this project is to reconcile two methods for modeling change in social networks over time: a class of statistical models and intelligent agent models. The research contrasts the properties of these two approaches, exploring what qualitative dynamic behaviors in social networks are... more
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NISS conducted research in data confidentiality, data quality, and data integration. Prototypes were built which could scale to operate on large sets of Federally held data. Researchers partnered with several large Federal Government statistical agencies. This topic was of particular importance... more
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Under a cooperative agreement with the EPA, NISS provided the EPA rapid access to the national statistics community, which in turn furnished statistical input and commentary on environmental issues in a timely basis to policy and decision makers, other officials and researchers. This project... more
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NISS studied how to conduct data swapping, one of a number of techniques meant to distort confidentiality-threatening high-dimensional characteristics of a database while preserving non-threatening low-dimensional characteristics. Data swapping exchanges attribute values between records. The issues... more
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Though inherently statistical, model evaluation lacks a unifying statistical framework. NISS was hired to help find a overlying system to help with model evaluation. The research team used Bayesian techniques to measure the degree to which a model captures the underlying reality; theory and methods... more
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The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) implemented NISS-developed strategies for operation of traffic signals on the near North side of Chicago. A team consisting of NISS, North Carolina State University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and CDOT developed prediction models using... more
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The goal was to design, implement and evaluate light weight instrumentation for software testing and profiling. The underlying concept was that different instances (users' copies) of the software are instrumented to collect information differently but lightly so that performance is not impaired.... more
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A critical problem for users of the World Wide Web is that many sites are difficult to navigate, hard to use and have confusing structure. Users may become lost, and they may make large leaps within a website (for example,
returning unnecessarily to the home page) that are inconsistent with its... more
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Data quality issues were being explored, along with paths to resolve them, for the Bureau of Transporation Studies' (BTS) Intermodal Transportation Database (ITDB). One principal recommendation is that BTS develop a software toolkit that would automate generic aspects of data quality assessments... more
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NISS was hired to help develop and build systems that expanded to Federal data but that preserved the confidentiality of the data and privacy of subjects. The systems would respond to queries from networked users of Federal data bases by performing and reporting statistical analyses that extract... more
Empirical analysis requires access to data. For data about important policy and management issues, information organizations (IOs) - such as government statistical agencies - are the conduit between data providers and data users. However, data confidentiality is a concern for IOs as they work to... more
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The Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) is used for purposes ranging from estimation of trend to environmental justice. It was created to force public disclosure of releases of toxic chemicals to the air, water and land. Under a cooperative agreement with EPA's Office of Environmental Information, NISS... more
One of the most common statistical procedures in quantitative social science research is to examine the association between a key predictor, X, and an outcome, Y, before and after adjusting for another predictor, Z. If the absolute value of that coefficient is reduced after adding Z, they infer... more
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) charged the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS) with convening a panel of technical experts to consider the issues of accounting for missing data in educational surveys. In particular, the panel was asked to address the following... more
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NISS examined emission models for integrating on road emissions data with traffic parameters and produced a usable method for traffic management operations. The team verified results by integrating results from remote sensor data on emission measurements and traffic data using area wide detectors.... more
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The Indices of Environmental Status and Trend project was part of a consortium including American, George Mason, Maryland-Baltimore County and Penn State that was organized by the EPA's Center of Environmental Information and Statistics. NISS worked on the protocols and case studies for the public... more
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NISS defined and developed a strategy for the evaluation of GM computer models, in cooperation with GM scientists, and implemented the strategy on test bed problems. Central research issues included the association of confidence limits to predictions of computer models; uncertainty estimates for... more
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Technical Report 63: One of the main features of the evolution of large software systems is that change-which is necessary to add new functionality, accommodate new hardware, and repair faults-becomes increasingly difficult over time. This phenomenon, which NISS called code decay, was studied by... more
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This research provides surrogate statistical models for the usually deterministic output of complex computer models which cannot be directly explored in great detail because of their size and limitations on the number of runs. The models ate based on a set of runs at selected inputs to aid in... more
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The Environmental Protection Agency and scientists from several universities across the United States and Canada worked on network design for environmental monitoring; space-time models, data fusion, health and pharmacokinetics; risk assesment of toxicants; and data representation and reporting.
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NISS was hired by the NAEP to develop new statistical methods to analyze complex surveys in the field of education. NISS developed more effective designs for answering basic questions facing education policy. A group of researchers including statisticians, psychometricians, and education... more
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Large data sets are a given in modern industry, technology and science and central issues concerning them demand statistical attention. While the need is apparent, paths to bringing statistical science to bear on large data sets are not clearly mapped. General approaches will emerge most rapidly if... more