Research
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
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
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
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
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
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
Senior Researcher:
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 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
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
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