ROE Student Paper Competition

Desmond Ang graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College and is currently pursuing a PhD. in Economics at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include development and behavioral economics. Prior to attending UCSD, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Indonesia and a researcher for Harvard Business School, UNICEF and the World Bank. Desmond is perhaps best known for his breakout role as Guy #2 in the New Hampshire State gun safety video, "Staying Safe Around Guns - High School Edition."

Proposed Research: The purpose of this study is to examine publication bias among field experiments evaluating education interventions. Publication bias is the phenomenon in which studies with statistically significant results are more likely to be published than those without. Assessing practices of publication is critical to the development of informed social policies and programs aimed at improving educational outcomes.

Laura Pryor is a PhD student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. She is part of the Quantitative Methods and Evaluation program and focuses on understanding and implementing the methods that most appropriately evaluate the impact of education and youth development initiatives. Laura’s interests in Research on Evaluation began as an American Evaluation Association Graduate Education Diversity Intern (GEDI), 2011-12 cohort. She looks forward to developing her evaluation interests throughout her doctoral program.

Proposed Research: Evaluators working in a PK-12 education context must navigate the increasingly popular topic of high-stakes teacher evaluation. Given the significant teacher opposition to high-stakes evaluation, how can evaluators approach teacher evaluation in a way that is meaningful for local stakeholders and speaks to larger policy initiatives? Using three years of data from a federally-funded Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) project, Laura’s research investigates the TIF evaluation model’s technical properties in order to understand if and how teacher evaluation systems can be used for the dual purposes of high-stakes decision-making and teacher improvement.

Nicole Zelinsky is a first-year Phd student working under the supervision of Dr. William Shadish and Dr. Jack Vevea at the University of California, Merced.  She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology and mathematics from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.  She is currently interested in both meta-analysis and how to approach publication bias in a meta-analysis. 

Research Project: The proposed research examines publication bias in a class of designs called single-case designs (SCDs) by surveying SCD researchers about their publication practices.  From this survey, we will determine if prejudice exists against publishing negative SCD results and if there is an effect size below which SCD researchers are reluctant to publish.  Furthermore, we will use that effect size to inform a weight function selection model that accounts for publication bias in SCD meta-analyses.  

Patrice Renée Cobb is a doctoral student of psychological sciences at the University of California, Merced under the supervision of Dr. William Shadish. She received her bachelors in psychology from Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. Her current research interests include semiparametric regression and time series data.

Research Project: Several methods have been proposed for the statistical analysis of single case designs, but all assume no trend or linear trend. Utilizing generalized additive models, a semiparametric regression method that allows the data to inform the selection of smoothed trend terms, I will examine the plausibility of these assumptions.