VARC staff are participating in a series of webinars sponsored by the department of education to provide support for districts considering implementing performance incentive systems as part of Race to the Top, Teacher Incentive Fund, or local initiatives. Michael Christian will be presenting in the session on Structuring Your Alternative Compensation Program: Challenges and Opportunities (to register click here). Chris Thorn and Peter Witham are the hosts of a session on Anticipating the Data Quality Challenges in TIF: Delivering Student-Teacher Linkages and Managing and Presenting Complex Data (to register click here). Recorded webinars will also be available after the fact on the CECR web site.

Amy McIntosh, New York City Department of Education Chief Talant Officer, discusses VARC’s contribution to the district’s teacher data initiative (New York City Department of Education website).

The Racine [WI] Unified School Board on Monday approved a new partnership with the [Value-Added Research Center at the] University of Wisconsin-Madison that will allow the district to identify which specific schools and teachers advance student achievement (Racine Journal Times, 16 March, 2010).

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Policy, Resources, and Practices Research

The VARC research teams use what we describe as Integrated Qualitative and Quantitative Research (IQ 2). The IQ 2 research framework builds on the strengths of both qualitative and quantitative research. One of the major strengths of qualitative research is that it provides a look inside the “black box” of teaching and learning. In particular, it makes it possible to identify the programs, policies, and inputs that are associated with effective teaching and learning. Unfortunately, the fact that qualitative research is enormously time consuming means that it is usually only feasible to study a limited number of schools and classrooms. As a result, qualitative research findings may not generalize to the wider universe of schools, and it is often difficult to disentangle the separate effects of multiple educational practices if the number of schools and classrooms included in the research is small. In addition, it is not always clear how schools and classrooms should be selected for inclusion in a qualitative study.

One of the major strengths of quantitative research is that it is possible to measure the association between multiple educational practices and measured student outcomes for the universe of schools, provided that it is possible to reliably measure educational practices (an issue that we will address below). Given appropriate conditions (more on this below), it may also be possible to use quantitative methods to estimate the causal link between educational practices and student outcomes. Unfortunately, quantitative research, in and of itself, provides limited insight into what educational practices should be evaluated and how these practices should be measured. Moreover, even in the largest data sets, it is not always possible to empirically identify the exact functional relationship between outcomes and multiple predictors (including the degree of interaction among variables).

The essence of the IQ 2 research framework is that it exploits the unique capabilities of qualitative and quantitative research to produce new information via data collection or analysis, and synchronizes the rapid exchange of this information. The result: a research process designed to discover the sources of school improvement much more rapidly than is possible via isolated qualitative and quantitative research.

Projects include:

SAGE Evaluation (WI DPI)

Literacy and Reading Policies and Instructional Practices

Supplemental Educational Services (SES)

VARC is housed within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at
the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Copyright ©2008, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System