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We present results from a meta-analysis of 37 contemporary experimental and quasi-experimental studies of summer programs in mathematics for children in Grades pre-K-12, examining what resources and characteristics predict stronger student achievement. Children who participated in summer programs that included mathematics activities experienced significantly better mathematics achievement outcomes, compared to their control group counterparts. We find an average weighted impact estimate of +0.10 standard deviations on mathematics achievement outcomes. We find similar effects for programs conducted in higher- and lower-poverty settings. We undertook a secondary analysis exploring the effect of summer programs on non-cognitive outcomes and found positive mean impacts. The results indicate that summer programs are a promising tool to strengthen children’s mathematical proficiency outside of school time.

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Many teacher education researchers have expressed concerns with the lack of rigorous impact evaluations of teacher preparation practices. I summarize these various concerns as they relate to issues of internal validity, external validity, and measurement. I then assess the prevalence of these issues by reviewing 166 impact evaluations of teacher preparation practices published in peer-reviewed journals between 2002-2019. Although I find that very few studies address issues of internal validity, external validity and measurement, I highlight some innovative approaches and present a checklist of considerations to assist future researchers in designing more rigorous impact evaluations.

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In conversation, uptake happens when a speaker builds on the contribution of their interlocutor by, for example, acknowledging, repeating or reformulating what they have said. In education, teachers' uptake of student contributions has been linked to higher student achievement. Yet measuring and improving teachers' uptake at scale is challenging, as existing methods require expensive annotation by experts. We propose a framework for computationally measuring uptake, by (1) releasing a dataset of student-teacher exchanges extracted from US math classroom transcripts annotated for uptake by experts; (2) formalizing uptake as pointwise Jensen-Shannon Divergence (pJSD), estimated via next utterance classification; (3) conducting a linguistically-motivated comparison of different unsupervised measures and (4) correlating these measures with educational outcomes. We find that although repetition captures a significant part of uptake, pJSD outperforms repetition-based baselines, as it is capable of identifying a wider range of uptake phenomena like question answering and reformulation. We apply our uptake measure to three different educational datasets with outcome indicators. Unlike baseline measures, pJSD correlates significantly with instruction quality in all three, providing evidence for its generalizability and for its potential to serve as an automated professional development tool for teachers.

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Despite calls for more evidence regarding the effectiveness of teacher education practices, causal research in the field remains rare. One reason is that we lack designs and measurement approaches that appropriately meet the challenges of causal inference in the context of teacher education programs. This article provides a framework for how to fill this gap. We first outline the difficulties of doing causal research in teacher education. We then describe a set of replicable practices for developing measures of key teaching outcomes, and propose causal research designs suited to the needs of the field. Finally, we identify community-wide initiatives that are necessary to advance effectiveness research in teacher education at scale.

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