Timothy Reese Cain
Assistant Professor, Department of Educational Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Dissertation Title: Academic Freedom in an Age of Organization, 1913-1941 (University of Michigan, 2005)
This dissertation explores the development of academic freedom and tenure in American higher education from the meetings that led to the formation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) through the endorsement of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Rather than focus exclusively on the AAUP, however, it examines the approaches and activities of a group of educational and related organizations, including the American Federation of Teachers, the Progressive Education Association, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Each attempted to define and protect faculty rights and each acted in relation to other interested organizations amidst concerns over unionization, professionalization, and civil liberties. The interactions of these groups, their efforts to work together, and their competition with each other influenced understandings of academic freedom, the defense of faculty rights, and the codification of policies designed to protect educational liberty. The resulting modern policies on academic freedom and tenure demonstrate a gradual conditional agreement on the part of mainstream faculty and administrators. After examining the national scene, this dissertation explores the local experience of academic freedom through case studies of the University of Michigan and other institutions in the state.
Sean Patrick Kelly
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Notre Dame
Dissertation Title: Race, Social Class, Student Engagement, and Unequal Literacy Development in Middle School English Classrooms (University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005)
In this study I investigate the determinants of student engagement. What causes some students to be highly engaged while other students within the very same classroom are disengaged? What can teachers do to promote widespread engagement? The data are taken from the Partnership for Literacy Study, a large observational study of instruction in middle school English classrooms. Classroom observations were designed to assess teachers' use of dialogic instruction, a model of instruction stressing incorporation of student ideas into classroom discourse. Using multilevel models to quantitatively assess levels of engagement within and between classes, I find that the most salient factor affecting the social distribution of student engagement is students' level of initial achievement. Students who begin class with weaker reading and writing skills are less likely to be engaged, setting the stage for a cycle of reduced achievement growth. When teachers focus on provoking student thought and analysis, and postpone evaluation during question and answer sessions by engaging in dialogic instruction, levels of student effort are more evenly distributed among students. Moreover, the relationship between levels of initial achievement and student effort is weaker in classrooms where teachers incorporate elements of dialogic instruction into question and answer sessions.
Douglas Lee Lauen*
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Policy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Dissertation Title: Opportunity for All? The Hidden Causes and Consequences of School Choice in Chicago (University of Chicago, 2006)
Throughout the 19th and 20th century, promoting equality of educational opportunity has been a cherished goal of American political culture. This dissertation addresses whether promoting choice in education abets, or undermines, equality of educational opportunity for disadvantaged students by examining the causes and consequences of school choice in Chicago, a city with a large public school choice program in which over half of high school students participate. The key contributions of this dissertation include 1) bringing historical and institutional analysis into the study of school choice; 2) estimating school, neighborhood, and peer effects on choice propensity; 3) estimating gains in school quality and productivity for those who exercise school choice; and, finally, 4) estimating the causal effect of school choice on graduation propensity. Through historical, institutional, and quantitative analysis, this study shows that school choice in Chicago is a tournament in which a small portion of advantaged students get most of the benefit. Families tend to avoid schools with disadvantaged students and exhibit racial homophily in their schooling enrollment decisions. Propensity score analysis indicates that those who exercise high school choice are more likely to graduate than observationally similar peers who remained in their assigned schools. The evidence suggests, however, that this gap exists only for students from the most advantaged backgrounds. In a finding that has important implications for the school choice debate, parents in Chicago tend to avoid neighborhood schools with high productivity levels. This finding calls into question the assumption that competitive pressure will lead to overall educational improvement.
Karthik Muralidharan
Postdoctoral Fellow, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University (2007- 2008) Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of California – San Diego (beginning July 2008)
Dissertation Title: Essays on the Economics of Education in Developing Countries (Harvard University, 2007)
Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving educational outcomes in schools, but the empirical evidence to date on its effectiveness is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students' test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 3% of annual pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on "conceptual" as well as "mechanical" components of the tests suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives. Group and individual incentive schools perform equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools significantly outperform in the second year. Incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly-chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value.
Mary Carmel Murphy*
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, Northwestern University
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago (beginning January 2009)
Dissertation Title: A Contextual Theory of Social Identity Threat: Cues, Contingencies, and Belonging in Academic Settings (Stanford University, 2007)
The dissertation examined two research questions: 1) how do people come to know the meaning and value of their social identity in academic settings? and 2) what are the particular concerns that students have when threatening situational cues exist in academic settings? Current explanations for the under-representation and underperformance of women in technical fields-and minorities in academia-focus on biological and socialization factors. Examining the case of women in Math, Science, and Engineering settings, I tested the cues hypothesis: empirically investigating how the structure, organization, and situational cues in academic environments impact people with stereotyped social identities. Results showed that situational cues can make students cognitively and physiologically vigilant, depress their sense of belonging, and decrease their academic motivation. The remaining four experiments examined perceived identity contingencies as a consequence of confronting threatening situational cues in academic environments. These social identity contingencies are students' specific self-presentational, evaluative, and treatment concerns in academic settings. Results demonstrated that perceptions of identity contingencies-signaled by situational cues in the classroom-significantly depressed students' situational belonging and academic motivation. Implications of this work for creating academic settings that preserve academic motivation and persistence, and foster belonging and identity-safety among underrepresented groups, are discussed.
* Exemplary Dissertation Award Winner eligible for $25,000 research grant.