Education Research Group
Professors S. Lynne
Stokes, Ian R. Harris, and Jung Cao have an educational statistics research
group. Professors Stokes and Cao have a grant from the
Institute of Educational Sciences at the Department of Education entitled “Examination
of Low Motivation in 12th Grade NAEP.” This project involves
examining data from 12th graders taking the National Assessment of
Educational Progress to determine if there are test-taking behaviors indicative
of low motivation that might explain the failure of the scores to increase, as
other measures of high school readiness have increased. The group is also
investigating measurement error issues using methods such as SIMEX to correct
for the bias of regression coefficients in models in which some of the
predictor variables are measured with error. The motivation for this work came
from attempts to use teacher intervention fidelity measures as predictors of
their student performance. Since teacher fidelity is measured by sampling
instruction time, it is measured with error. Professors Stokes, Harris, and Cao
are co-investigators in a series of jointly funded projects with SMU’s
Institute for Reading Research. Several Department of Statistical Science graduate
students are supported by work in the data laboratory of the institute managing
and analyzing data for large-scale reading intervention programs.