When Developers Commission Studies, What Develops?

I have the greatest respect for commercial developers and disseminators of educational programs, software, and professional development. As individuals, I think they genuinely want to improve the practice of education, and help produce better outcomes for children. However, most developers are for-profit companies, and they have shareholders who are focused on the bottom line. So when developers carry out evaluations, or commission evaluation companies to do so on their behalf, perhaps it’s best to keep in mind a bit of dialogue from a Marx Brothers movie. Someone asks Groucho if Chico is honest. “Sure,” says Groucho, “As long as you watch him!”

         A healthy role for developers in evidence-based reform in education is desirable. Publishers, software developers, and other commercial companies have a lot of capital, and a strong motivation to create new products with evidence of effectiveness that will stand up to scrutiny. In medicine, most advances in practical drugs and treatments are made by drug companies. If you’re a cynic, this may sound disturbing. But for a long time, the federal government has encouraged drug companies to do development and evaluation of new drugs, but they have strict rules about what counts as conclusive evidence. Basically, the government says, following Groucho, “Are drug companies honest? Sure, as long as you watch ‘em.”

            In our field, we may want to think about how to do this. As one contribution, my colleague Betsy Wolf did some interesting research on outcomes of studies sponsored by developers, compared to those conducted by independent, third parties. She looked at all reading/literacy and math studies listed on the What Works Clearinghouse database. The first thing she found was very disturbing. Sure enough, the effect sizes for the developer-commissioned studies (ES = +0.27, n=73) were twice as large as those for independent studies (ES = +0.13, n=96). That’s a huge difference.

Being a curious person, Betsy wanted to know why developer-commissioned studies had effect sizes that were so much larger than independent ones. We now know a lot about study characteristics that inflate effect sizes. The most inflationary are small sample size, use of measures made by researchers or developers (rather than independent measures), and use of quasi-experiments instead of randomized designs. Developer-commissioned studies were in fact much more likely to use researcher/developer-made measures (29% in developer-commissioned vs. 8% in independent studies), and randomized vs. quasi-experiments (51% quasi-experiments for developer-commissioned studies vs. 15% quasi-experiments for independent studies). However, sample sizes were similar in developer-commissioned and independent studies. And most surprising, statistically controlling for all of these factors did not reduce the developer effect by very much.

If there is so much inflation of effect sizes in developer-commissioned studies, then how come controlling for the largest factors that usually cause effect size inflation does not explain the developer effect?

There is a possible reason for this, which Betsy cautiously advances (since it cannot be proven). Perhaps the reason that effect sizes are inflated in developer-commissioned studies is not due to the nature of the studies we can find, but to the studies we cannot find. There has long been recognition of what is called the “file drawer effect,” which happens when studies that do not obtain a positive outcome disappear (into a file drawer). Perhaps developers are especially likely to hide disappointing findings. Unlike academic studies, which are likely to exist as technical reports or dissertations, perhaps commercial companies have no incentive to make null findings findable in any form.

This may not be true, or it may be true of some but not other developers. But if government is going to start taking evidence a lot more seriously, as it has done with the ESSA evidence standards (see www.evidenceforessa.org), it is important to prevent developers, or any researchers, from hiding their null findings.

There is a solution to this problem that is heading rapidly in our direction. This is pre-registration. In pre-registration, researchers or evaluators must file a study design, measures, and analyses about to be used in a study, but perhaps most importantly, pre-registration announces that a study exists, or will exist soon. If a developer pre-registered a study but that study never showed up in the literature, this might be a cause for losing faith in the developer. Imagine that the What Works Clearinghouse, Evidence for ESSA, and journals refused to accept research reports on programs unless the study had been pre-registered, and unless all other studies of the program were made available.

Some areas of medicine use pre-registration, and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness is moving toward introducing a pre-registration process for education. Use of pre-registration and other safeguards could be a boon to commercial developers, as it is to drug companies, because it could build public confidence in developer-sponsored research. Admittedly, it would take many years and/or a lot more investment in educational research to make this practical, but there are concrete steps we could take in that direction.

I’m not sure I see any reason we shouldn’t move toward pre-registration. It would be good for Groucho, good for Chico, and good for kids. And that’s good enough for me!

Photo credit: By Paramount Pictures (source) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

The Good, the Bad, and the (Un)Promising

The ESSA evidence standards are finally beginning to matter. States are starting the process that will lead them to make school improvement awards to their lowest-achieving schools. The ESSA law is clear that for schools to qualify for these awards, they must agree to implement programs that meet the strong, moderate, or promising levels of the ESSA evidence standards. This is very exciting for those who believe in the power of proven programs to transform schools and benefit children. It is good news for kids, for teachers, and for our profession.

But inevitably, there is bad news with the good. If evidence is to be a standard for government funding, there are bound to be people who disseminate programs lacking high-quality evidence who will seek to bend the definitions to declare themselves “proven.” And there are also bound to be schools and districts that want to keep using what they have always used, or to keep choosing programs based on factors other than evidence, while doing the minimum the law requires.

The battleground is the ESSA “promising” criterion. “Strong” programs are pretty well defined as having significant positive evidence from high-quality randomized studies. “Moderate” programs are pretty well defined as having significant positive evidence from high-quality matched studies. Both “strong” and “moderate” are clearly defined in Evidence for ESSA (www.evidenceforessa.org), and, with a bit of translation, by the What Works Clearinghouse, both of which list specific programs that meet or do not meet these standards.

“Promising,” on the other hand is kind  of . . . squishy. The ESSA evidence standards do define programs meeting “promising” as ones that have statistically significant effects in “well-designed and well-implemented” correlational studies, with controls for inputs (e.g., pretests).  This sounds good, but it is hard to nail down in practice. I’m seeing and hearing about a category of studies that perfectly illustrate the problem. Imagine that a developer commissions a study of a form of software. A set of schools and their 1000 students are assigned to use the software, while control schools and their 1000 students do not have access to the software but continue with business as usual.

Computers routinely produce “trace data” that automatically tells researchers all sorts of things about how much students used the software, what they did with it, how successful they were, and so on.

The problem is that typically, large numbers of students given software do not use it. They may never even hit a key, or they may use the software so little that the researchers rule the software use to be effectively zero. So in a not unusual situation, let’s assume that in the treatment group, the one that got the software, only 500 of the 1000 students actually used the software at an adequate level.

Now here’s the rub. Almost always, the 500 students will out-perform the 1000 controls, even after controlling for pretests. Yet this would be likely to happen even if the software were completely ineffective.

To understand this, think about the 500 students who did use the software and the 500 who did not. The users are probably more conscientious, hard-working, and well-organized. The 500 non-users are more likely to be absent a lot, to fool around in class, to use their technology to play computer games, or go on (non-school-related) social media, rather than to do math or science for example. Even if the pretest scores in the user and non-user groups were identical, they are not identical students, because their behavior with the software is not equal.

I once visited a secondary school in England that was a specially-funded model for universal use of technology. Along with colleagues, I went into several classes. The teachers were teaching their hearts out, making constant use of the technology that all students had on their desks. The students were well-behaved, but just a few dominated the discussion. Maybe the others were just a bit shy, we thought. From the front of each class, this looked like the classroom of the future.

But then, we filed to the back of each class, where we could see over students’ shoulders. And we immediately saw what was going on. Maybe 60 or 70 percent of the students were actually on social media unrelated to the content, paying no attention to the teacher or instructional software!

Now imagine that a study compared the 30-40% of students who were actually using the computers to students with similar pretests in other schools who had no computers at all. Again, the users would look terrific, but this is not a fair comparison, because all the goof-offs and laggards in the computer school had selected themselves out of the study while goof-offs and laggards in the control group were still included.

Rigorous researchers use a method called intent-to-treat, which in this case would include every student, whether or not they used the software or played non-educational computer games. “Not fair!” responds the software developer, because intent-to-treat includes a lot of students who never touched a key except to use social media. No sophisticated researcher accepts such an argument, however, because including only users gives the experimental group a big advantage.

Here’s what is happening at the policy level. Software developers are using data from studies that only include the students who made adequate use of the software. They are then claiming that such studies are correlational and meet the “promising” standard of ESSA.

Those who make this argument are correct in saying that such studies are correlational. But these studies are very, very, very bad, because they are biased toward the treatment. The ESSA standards specify well-designed and well-implemented studies, and these studies may be correlational, but they are not well-designed or well-implemented. Software developers and other vendors are very concerned about the ESSA evidence standards, and some may use the “promising” category as a loophole. Evidence for ESSA does not accept such studies, even as promising, and the What Works Clearinghouse does not even have any category that corresponds to “promising.” Yet vendors are flooding state departments of education and districts with studies they claim to meet the ESSA standards, though in the lowest category.

Recently, I heard something that could be a solution to this problem. Apparently, some states are announcing that for school improvement grants, and any other purpose that has financial consequences, they will only accept programs with “strong” and “moderate” evidence. They have the right to do this; the federal law says school improvement grants must support programs that at least meet the “promising” standard, but it does not say states cannot set a higher minimum standard.

One might argue that ignoring “promising” studies is going too far. In Evidence for ESSA (www.evidenceforessa.org), we accept studies as “promising” if they have weaknesses that do not lead to bias, such as clustered studies that were significant at the student but not the cluster level. But the danger posed by studies claiming to fit “promising” using biased designs is too great. Until the feds fix the definition of “promising” to exclude bias, the states may have to solve it for themselves.

I hope there will be further development of the “promising” standard to focus it on lower-quality but unbiased evidence, but as things are now, perhaps it is best for states themselves to declare that “promising” is no longer promising.

Eventually, evidence will prevail in education, as it has in many other fields, but on the way to that glorious future, we are going to have to make some adjustments. Requiring that “promising” be truly promising would be a good place to begin.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

 

Ensuring That Proven Programs Stay Effective in Practice

On a recent trip to Scotland, I visited a ruined abbey. There, in what remained of its ancient cloister, was a sign containing a rule from the 1459 Statute of the Strasbourg Stonecutters’ Guild:

If a master mason has agreed to build a work and has made a drawing of the work as it is to be executed, he must not change this original. But he must carry out the work according to the plan that he has presented to the lords, towns, or villages, in such a way that the work will not be diminished or lessened in value.

Although the Stonecutters’ Guild was writing more than five centuries ago, it touched on an issue we face right now in evidence-based reform in education. Providers of educational programs may have excellent evidence that meets ESSA standards and demonstrates positive effects on educational outcomes. That’s terrific, of course. But the problem is that after a program has gone into dissemination, its developers may find that schools are not willing or able to pay for all of the professional development or software or materials used in the experiments that validated the program. So they may provide less, sometimes much less, to make the program cheaper or easier to adopt. This is the problem that concerned the Stonecutters of Strasbourg: Grand plans followed by inadequate construction.

In our work on Evidence for ESSA, we see this problem all the time. A study or studies show positive effects for a program. In writing up information on costs, personnel, and other factors, we usually look at the program’s website. All too often, we find that the program on the website provides much less than the program that was evaluated.  The studies might have provided weekly coaching, but the website promises two visits a year. A study of a tutoring program might have involved one-to-two tutoring, but the website sells or licenses the materials in sets of 20 for use with groups of that size. A study of a technology program may have provided laptops to every child and a full-time technology coordinator, while the website recommends one device for every four students and never mentions a technology coordinator.

Whenever we see this, we take on the role of the Stonecutters’ Guild, and we have to be as solid as a rock. We tell developers that we are planning to describe their program as it was implemented in their successful studies. This sometimes causes a ruckus, with vendors arguing that providing what they did in the study would make the program too expensive. “So would you like us to list your program (as it is in your website) as unevaluated?” we say. We are not unreasonable, but we are tough, because we see ourselves as helping schools make wise and informed choices, not helping vendors sell programs that may have little resemblance to the programs that were evaluated.

This is hard work, and I’m sure we do not get it right 100% of the time. And a developer may agree to an honest description but then quietly give discounts and provide less than what our descriptions say. All we can do is state the truth on our website about what was provided in the successful studies as best as we can, and the schools have to insist that they receive the program as described.

The Stonecutters’ Guild, and many other medieval guilds, represented the craftsmen, not the customers. Yet part of their function was to uphold high standards of quality. It was in the collective interest of all members of the guild to create and maintain a “brand,” indicating that any product of the guild’s members met the very highest standards. Someday, we hope publishers, software developers, professional development providers, and others who work with schools will themselves insist on an evidence base for their products, and then demand that providers ensure that their programs continue to be implemented in ways that maximize the probability that they will produce positive outcomes for children.

Stonecutters only build buildings. Educators affect the lives of children, which in turn affect families, communities, and societies. Long after a stonecutter’s work has fallen into ruin, well-educated people and their descendants and communities will still be making a difference. As researchers, developers, and educators, we have to take this responsibility at least as seriously as did the stone masons of long ago.

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

Effect Sizes and the 10-Foot Man

If you ever go into the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum in Baltimore, you will be greeted at the entrance by a statue of the tallest man who ever lived, Robert Pershing Wadlow, a gentle giant at 8 feet, 11 inches in his stocking feet. Kids and adults love to get their pictures taken standing by him, to provide a bit of perspective.

I bring up Mr. Wadlow to explain a phrase I use whenever my colleagues come up with an effect size of more than 1.00. “That’s a 10-foot man,” I say. What I mean, of course, is that while it is not impossible that there could be a 10-foot man someday, it is extremely unlikely, because there has never been a man that tall in all of history. If someone reports seeing one, they are probably mistaken.

In the case of effect sizes you will never, or almost never, see an effect size of more than +1.00, assuming the following reasonable conditions:

1. The effect size compares experimental and control groups (i.e., it is not pre-post).
2. The experimental and control group started at the same level, or they started at similar levels and researchers statistically controlled for pretest differences.
3. The measures involved were independent of the researcher and the treatment, not made by the developers or researchers. The test was not given by the teachers to their own students.
4. The treatment was provided by ordinary teachers, not by researchers, and could in principle be replicated widely in ordinary schools. The experiment had a duration of at least 12 weeks.
5. There were at least 30 students and 2 teachers in each treatment group (experimental and control).

If these conditions are met, the chances of finding effect sizes of more than +1.00 are about the same as the chances of finding a 10-foot man. That is, zero.

I was thinking about the 10-foot man when I was recently asked by a reporter about the “two sigma effect” claimed by Benjamin Bloom and much discussed in the 1970s and 1980s. Bloom’s students did a series of experiments in which students were taught about a topic none of them knew anything about, usually principles of sailing. After a short period, students were tested. Those who did not achieve at least 80% (defined as “mastery”) on the tests were tutored by University of Chicago graduate students long enough to ensure that every tutored student reached mastery. The purpose of this demonstration was to make a claim that every student could learn whatever we wanted to teach them, and the only variable was instructional time, as some students need more time to learn than others. In a system in which enough time could be given to all, “ability” would disappear as a factor in outcomes. Also, in comparison to control groups who were not taught about sailing at all, the effect size was often more than 2.0, or two sigma. That’s why this principle was called the “two sigma effect.” Doesn’t the two sigma effect violate my 10-foot man principle?

No, it does not. The two sigma studies used experimenter-made tests of content taught to the experimental but not control groups. It used University of Chicago graduate students providing far more tutoring (as a percentage of initial instruction) than any school could ever provide. The studies were very brief and sample sizes were small. The two sigma experiments were designed to prove a point, not to evaluate a feasible educational method.

A more recent example of the 10-foot man principle is found in Visible Learning, the currently fashionable book by John Hattie claiming huge effect sizes for all sorts of educational treatments. Hattie asks the reader to ignore any educational treatment with an effect size of less than +0.40, and reports many whole categories of teaching methods with average effect sizes of more than +1.00. How can this be?

The answer is that such effect sizes, like two sigma, do not incorporate the conditions I laid out. Instead, Hattie throws into his reviews entire meta-analyses which may include pre-post studies, studies using researcher-made measures, studies with tiny samples, and so on. For practicing educators, such effect sizes are useless. An educator knows that all children grow from pre- to posttest. They would not (and should not) accept measures made by researchers. The largest known effect sizes that do meet the above conditions are one-to-one tutoring studies with effect sizes up to +0.86. Still not +1.00. What could be more effective than the best of 1-1 tutoring?

It’s fun to visit Mr. Wadlow at the museum, and to imagine what an ever taller man could do on a basketball team, for example. But if you see a 10-foot man at Ripley’s Believe it or Not, or anywhere else, here’s my suggestion. Don’t believe it. And if you visit a museum of famous effect sizes that displays a whopper effect size of +1.00, don’t believe that, either. It doesn’t matter how big effect sizes are if they are not valid.

A 10-foot man would be a curiosity. An effect size of +1.00 is a distraction. Our work on evidence is too important to spend our time looking for 10-foot men, or effect sizes of +1.00, that don’t exist.

Photo credit: [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.

The Mill and The School

 

On a recent trip to Scotland, I visited some very interesting oat mills. I always love to visit medieval mills, because I find it endlessly fascinating how people long ago used natural forces and materials – wind, water, and fire, stone, wood, and metal – to create advanced mechanisms that had a profound impact on society.

In Scotland, it’s all about oat mills (almost everywhere else, it’s wheat). These grain mills date back to the 10^th century. In their time, they were a giant leap in technology. A mill is very complicated, but at its heart are two big innovations. In the center of the mill, a heavy millstone turns on top of another. The grain is poured through a hole in the top stone for grinding. The miller’s most difficult task is to maintain an exact distance between the stones. A few millimeters too far apart and no milling happens. A few millimeters too close and the heat of friction can ruin the machinery, possibly causing a fire.

The other key technology is the water wheel (except in windmills, of course). The water mill is part of a system that involves a carefully controlled flow of water from a millpond, which the miller uses to provide exactly the right amount of water to turn a giant wooden wheel, which powers the top millstone.

The medieval grain mill is not a single innovation, but a closely integrated system of innovations. Millers learned to manage this complex technology in a system of apprenticeship over many years.

Mills enabled medieval millers to obtain far more nutrition from an acre of grain than was possible before. This made it possible for land to support many more people, and the population surged. The whole feudal system was built around the economics of mills, and mills thrived through the 19^th century.

What does the mill have to with the school? Mills only grind well-behaved grain into well-behaved flour, while schools work with far more complex children, families, and all the systems that surround them. The products of schools must include joy and discovery, knowledge and skills.

Yet as different as they are, mills have something to teach us. They show the importance of integrating diverse systems that can then efficiently deliver desired outcomes. Neither a mill nor an effective school comes into existence because someone in power tells it to. Instead, complex systems, mills or schools, must be created, tested, adapted to local needs, and constantly improved. Once we know how to create, manage, and disseminate effective mills or schools, policies can be readily devised to support their expansion and improvement.

Important progress in societies and economies almost always comes about from development of complex, multi-component innovations that, once developed, can be disseminated and continuously improved. The same is true of schools. Changes in governance or large-scale policies can enhance (or inhibit) the possibility of change, but the reality of reform depends on creation of complex, integrated systems, from mills to ships to combines to hospitals to schools.

For education, what this means is that system transformation will come only when we have whole-school improvement approaches that are known to greatly increase student outcomes. Whole-school change is necessary because many individual improvements are needed to make big changes, and these must be carefully aligned with each other. Just as the huge water wheel and the tiny millstone adjustment mechanism and other components must work together in the mill, the key parts of a school must work together in synchrony to produce maximum impact, or the whole system fails to work as well as it should.

For example, if you look at research on proven programs, you’ll find effective strategies for school management, for teaching, and for tutoring struggling readers. These are all well and good, but they work so much better if they are linked to each other.

To understand this, first consider tutoring. Especially in the elementary grades, there is no more effective strategy. Our recent review of research on programs for struggling readers finds that well-qualified teaching assistants can be as effective as teachers in tutoring struggling readers, and that while one-to-four tutoring is less effective than one-to-one, it is still a lot more effective than no tutoring. So an evidence-oriented educator might logically choose to implement proven one-to-one and/or one-to-small group tutoring programs to improve school outcomes.

However, tutoring only helps the students who receive it, and it is expensive. A wise school administrator might reason that tutoring alone is not sufficient, but improving the quality of classroom instruction is also essential, both to improve outcomes for students who do not need tutoring and to reduce the number of students who do need tutoring. There is an array of proven classroom methods the principal or district might choose to improve student outcomes in all subjects and grade levels (see www.evidenceforessa.org).

But now consider students who are at risk because they are not attending regularly, or have behavior problems, or need eyeglasses but do not have them. Flexible school-level systems are necessary to ensure that students are in school, eager to learn, well-behaved, and physically prepared to succeed.

In addition, there is a need to have school principals and other leaders learn strategies for making effective use of proven programs. These would include managing professional development, coaching, monitoring implementation and outcomes of proven programs, distributed leadership, and much more. Leadership also requires jointly setting school goals with all school staff and monitoring progress toward these goals.

These are all components of the education “mill” that have to be designed, tested, and (if effective) disseminated to ever-increasing numbers of schools. Like the mill, an effective school design integrates individual parts, makes them work in synchrony, constantly assesses their functioning and output, and adjusts procedures when necessary.

Many educational theorists argue that education will only change when systems change. Ferocious battles rage about charters vs. ordinary public schools, about adopting policies of countries that do well on international tests, and so on. These policies can be important, but they are unlikely to create substantial and lasting improvement unless they lead to development and dissemination of proven whole-school approaches.

Effective school improvement is not likely to come about from let-a-thousand-flowers-bloom local innovation, nor from top-level changes in policy or governance. Sufficient change will not come about by throwing individual small innovations into schools and hoping they will collectively make a difference. Instead, effective improvement will take root when we learn how to reliably create effective programs for schools, implement them in a coordinated and planful way, find them effective, and then disseminate them. Once such schools are widespread, we can build larger policies and systems around their needs.

Coordinated, schoolwide improvement approaches offer schools proven strategies for increasing the achievement and success of their children. There should be many programs of this kind, among which schools and districts can choose. A school is not the same as mill, but the mill provides at least one image of how creating complex, integrated replicable systems can change whole societies and economies. We should learn from this and many other examples of how to focus our efforts to improve outcomes for all children.

Photo credit: By Johnson, Helen Kendrik [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

This blog was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Foundation.