Category: Education

Optimal’s Mark Turner recently joined the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) Employer Roundtable. The CGS Employer Roundtable is a small group of senior leaders representing employers of graduate degree holders in various fields and organizations serving higher education. CGS serves to advance graduate education and research in the U.S. and globally. Dr. Turner brings the perspective of small businesses that employ graduate degree holders to the roundtable that is mostly composed of global businesses and organizations — Amazon, Corning, IBM, and TIAA. For more information, see CGS Employer Roundtable.

Optimal’s executive, Tracye Turner, recently delivered career lessons learned and best practices remarks to new graduates at the 2022 spring commencement at the University of Maryland’s School of Information Studies. The fast-growing school has high job offer rates and in-demand graduates. She frequently collaborates with the iSchool, serves on the iLead Advisory Council, and was the Inaugural Chair. She shared her top 10 career lessons learned in cyclical job markets. For more information, see Spring 2022 Commencement Ceremony | University of Maryland (umd.edu)

Optimal’s education research team will be presenting at the International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN) conference on September 7-9, 2022. The team will present the methodological approach developed to collect mask mandate information by automating Google searches and using NLP to classify the results by developing a customized robotic process automation program. This year’s theme for the conference includes using AI and collecting data to validate and improve official statistics.

For more information on the conference, visit https://ipdln.org/2022-conference.

Authors: Ebony Walton, Statistician, NCES; Daniel Loew, Research Associate, Optimal Solutions Group; Imer Arnautovic, Research Associate, Optimal Solutions Group; and Enis Dogan, Chief Psychometrician, NCES

As is well known in education research, performance differences in achievement persist between groups of students in the U.S. and addressing them by ensuring equal access to high-quality education for all is a part of the U.S. Department of Education’s mission. This mission requires defining and measuring educational equity. The National Center for Education Statistics’ Equity Indicators Project aims to provide a solid data resource for researchers, policymakers, and the general public regarding educational equity.  A set of dozens of equity measures, which were informed by literature review, provide the framework for this data resource. Optimal Solutions Group has conducted a systematic review of survey instruments and codebooks for seven current NCES data sources as a pilot effort, resulting in a repository of over 3,000 data items relevant to the set of equity measures. Further data sources will be mined to provide a sufficient set of data items from which to measure educational equity. The authors will classify the set of equity measures into a logic model, designated with the logic model labels of inputs, processes, outputs, and outcomes. This logic model will be used to develop a theoretical model to measure and define educational equity, which will support a deeper understanding of how to evaluate it in a variety of settings. In so doing, this work will further the U.S. Department of Education’s central mission to provide equal access to a high level of quality education for all students in the United States.  

To learn more about the 2022 NCES STATS-DC Data Conference, visit https://ies.ed.gov/whatsnew/conferences/?id=15617&cid=2