Whitney Cade | American Institutes for Research (original) (raw)
Papers by Whitney Cade
National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), Dec 1, 2016
UTeach is a well-known, university-based program designed to increase the number of high-quality ... more UTeach is a well-known, university-based program designed to increase the number of high-quality STEM teachers in the workforce. Despite substantial investment and rapid program diffusion, there is little evidence about the effectiveness of UTeach graduates. Using administrative data from the state of Texas, we measure the impact of having a UTeach teacher on student test scores in math and science in middle schools and high schools. We find that students taught by UTeach teachers perform significantly better on end-of-grade tests in math and end-of-course tests in math and science by 8% to 14% of a standard deviation on the test, depending on grade and subject.
Economics of Education Review, Jun 1, 2018
UTeach is a well-known, university-based program designed to increase the number of high-quality ... more UTeach is a well-known, university-based program designed to increase the number of high-quality science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers in the workforce. The UTeach program was originally developed by faculty at the University of Texas at Austin but has rapidly spread and is now available at 44 universities in 21 states; it is expected to produce more than 9,000 math and science teachers by 2020. Despite substantial investment and rapid program diffusion, there is little evidence to date about the effectiveness of UTeach graduates. Using administrative data from the state of Texas, we measure UTeach impacts on student test scores in math and science in middle schools and high schools. We find that students taught by UTeach teachers perform significantly better on end-ofgrade tests in math and end-of-course tests in math and science by 5% to 12% of a standard deviation on the test, depending on grade and subject. The effect is larger for the founding site at the University of Texas at Austin than for replication UTeach sites, with estimated upper bounds of additional months of learning for students taught by UTeach Austin graduates of 4.0 months in high school math and 5.7 months in high school science. Controlling for the selectivity of the undergraduate institution appears to explain the differential between Austin and replication UTeach sites, but not the overall difference between UTeach and non-UTeach teachers. 2 Garcia Mathewson, Tara. "NAEP: 4th, 8th grade science scores are up; 12th grade scores are flat." Education Dive.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jul 18, 2022
Considerable amount of research in educational data mining has focused on developing efficient al... more Considerable amount of research in educational data mining has focused on developing efficient algorithms for Knowledge Tracing (KT). However, in practice, many real-world learning systems used at scale struggle to implement KT capabilities, especially if they weren't originally designed for it. One key challenge is to accurately label existing items with skills, which often turns out to be a herculean task. In this paper, we investigate whether an increasingly popular approach to knowledge tracing, the use of neural network models, can be a partial solution to this problem. We conducted a case study within a commercial math blended learning system. Using the data collected from middle school students' use of the system over two years, we compare the performance of a neural network-based KT model (DKVMN) in three scenarios: 1) with the original (possibly unreliable) system-provided skill tags, 2) with coarser-grained domain tags based on state standards, and 3) without inputting any mappings between content and skills. Our results suggest that including the system-provided skills in the training of the model leads to the worst performance. The best performance is observed when the skills are entirely disregarded. This supports the possibility of bypassing the laborious step of item-skill tagging in real-world learning systems which were not originally designed to work with KT models, especially if the goal is only to predict the performance of a student on future items. We discuss the implications of our findings for practice and future research.
While the impact of pedagogical agent pointing and dynamic visual aids in intelligent tutoring sy... more While the impact of pedagogical agent pointing and dynamic visual aids in intelligent tutoring systems has been evaluated by many researchers, there remains a question as to how the combination of the two can impact a student's learning and agent perceptions. In this study, 34 university students were exposed to four Biology lectures delivered by a lifelike agent. The impact of two attentional guiding techniques (agent pointing and sequential image display) on students' opinions of the agent, learning, and gaze behavior were investigated. Agent pointing had no effect on perception of the agent or learning. Sequential display was found to increase student perceptions of lesson easiness and arousal but had no effect on learning. Both agent pointing and sequential display impacted the gaze patterns. These results are consonant with previous work on the effects of pointing, but depart from the image display literature where attentionguiding techniques normally improve learning.
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 2021
Abstract A focus on intraindividual change and person-specific pathways is a necessary starting p... more Abstract A focus on intraindividual change and person-specific pathways is a necessary starting point for developmental science inquiries. However, research often relies on ergodicity-based assumptions about group averages and other variable-centered approaches. Using ideas associated with relational developmental systems metatheory, such as the Bornstein Specificity Principle, we re-examine the ergodicity assumption using Executive Functioning (EF) data from the Measures and Methods Across the Developmental Continuum Project. Participants from Grades 4 to 12 (M age = 14.60) completed three behavioral EF tasks (i.e., working memory, response inhibition, and cognitive flexibility). The final analytic sample included 64 participants who provided data on 30 measurement occasions. Intraindividual and interindividual EF latent constructs appeared to be different, and we identified a wide range of person-specific EF trajectories. These findings challenge the ergodicity assumption framing variable- and group-oriented approaches to individual development. This study demonstrates the feasibility of collecting intensive longitudinal data to understand youth development on an individual level as an alternative to immediate data aggregation and as means to illuminate the use of the specificity principle in understanding human development and in applications pertinent to enhancing the lives of diverse youth across specific times and places in their specific developmental pathways.
Texas Education Research Center, May 1, 2019
Journal for Person-Oriented Research, 2022
The purpose of this study was to investigate within- and between-person associations between slee... more The purpose of this study was to investigate within- and between-person associations between sleep and subsequent goal setting in adolescents. We conducted an intensive repeated measures longitudinal study to assess intra- and interindividual associations between sleep and goal setting and potential moderators of such associations. Thirty-nine seventh through 12th graders reported on their sleep quality and propensity to set goals in their daily lives several times per week for approximately four months. We used a combination of multilevel modeling with time-varying covariates and centering techniques to partition within- and between-person variance. We found significant and positive associations between sleep and goal setting within individuals, but no such associations between individuals. That is, students were more likely to set goals for their work after getting a good night’s sleep relative to their own average sleep quality, but getting good sleep on average relative to other...
According to the Department of Education, there are more than 2,000 teacher preparation programs ... more According to the Department of Education, there are more than 2,000 teacher preparation programs (TPPs) in the United States1, but despite these numbers, concerns remain about the quality and quantity of STEM teachers in the workforce. For instance, Augustine (2007) finds that 61% of chemistry teachers and 67% of physics teachers did not major in and/or receive certification in their topic area (Augustine, 2007), and thus may not have the same content knowledge as a teacher who specialized in that topic. Furthermore, 20-30% of schools reported difficulties finding and employing STEM teachers between 2000 and 2012 (Cowan et al., 2016).
Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2018
Whitney Layne Cade granted permission for the digitization of her paper. It was submitted by CD
Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction, 2013
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
... Whitney L. Cade1, Jessica L. Copeland1, Natalie K. Person1, and Sidney K. D&#... more ... Whitney L. Cade1, Jessica L. Copeland1, Natalie K. Person1, and Sidney K. D'Mello2 ... Feltovich, PJ, Spiro, RJ, Coulson, RL: The nature of conceptual understanding in bio-medicine: The deep structure of complex ideas and the development of misconceptions. ...
Natalie Person, served on nearly all of my milestone committees and always had insightful comment... more Natalie Person, served on nearly all of my milestone committees and always had insightful comments, an editorial eye, and good jokes, and for that I thank you. I would also like to recognize my real family and my IIS family, who supported me through the process of getting my degrees. Without you, none of this would be possible and it certainly would have been less fun. The biggest thanks goes to Patrick Hays, who kept me motivated until the end, listened to all of my data woes and triumphs, and stopped me from taking any of it too seriously. I made it through graduate school only because of you, and there are no words to express how much you have meant to me.
Economics of Education Review
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of Nlp For Building Educational Applications, Jun 24, 2011
... Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 111119, Portl... more ... Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 111119, Portland, Oregon, 24 June 2011. cO2011 Association for Computational Linguistics Generating Concept Map Exercises from Textbooks Andrew M. Olney, Whitney L. Cade, and Claire ...
Being able to monitor collaborative learning environments using unobtrusive measures is crucial t... more Being able to monitor collaborative learning environments using unobtrusive measures is crucial to maximizing students’ socioaffective experiences with a system. This analysis uses the cohesion of student responses to model students’ feelings of power and connectedness to the group, two factors which emerge from a principal component analysis of a motivational survey.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015
While many aspects of tutoring have been identified and studied, off topic conversation has been ... more While many aspects of tutoring have been identified and studied, off topic conversation has been largely ignored. In this paper, off topic conversation during 50 hours of one-to-one expert tutoring sessions was analyzed. Two distinct methodologies (Dialogue Move occurrence and LIWC analysis) were used to determine the anatomy of off topic conversation. Both analyses revealed that the expected social talk occurred, but pedagogically-relevant talk emerged as well. These occurrences may reflect the discussion of more global pedagogical strategies. These findings suggest that off topic conversation may serve a useful purpose in tutoring and that further investigation is warranted.
In a corpus of expert tutoring dialogue, conversation that is considered to be "off topic&qu... more In a corpus of expert tutoring dialogue, conversation that is considered to be "off topic" (non-pedagogical) according to a previous coding scheme is explored for its value in tutoring dynamics. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool, phases of tutoring categorized as "off topic" were compared with interactive problem solving phases to explore how the two differ on the emotional, psychological, and topical dimensions analyzed by LIWC. The results suggest that conversation classified as "off topic" serves as motivation and broad pedagogy in tutoring. These findings can be used to orient future research on "off topic" conversation, and help to make sense of both previous coding schemes and noisy data sets.
In a corpus of expert tutoring dialogue, conversation that is considered to be "off topic" (non-p... more In a corpus of expert tutoring dialogue, conversation that is considered to be "off topic" (non-pedagogical) according to a previous coding scheme is explored for its value in tutoring dynamics. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool, phases of tutoring categorized as "off topic" were compared with interactive problem solving phases to explore how the two differ on the emotional, psychological, and topical dimensions analyzed by LIWC. The results suggest that conversation classified as "off topic" serves as motivation and broad pedagogy in tutoring. These findings can be used to orient future research on "off topic" conversation, and help to make sense of both previous coding schemes and noisy data sets.
National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER), Dec 1, 2016
UTeach is a well-known, university-based program designed to increase the number of high-quality ... more UTeach is a well-known, university-based program designed to increase the number of high-quality STEM teachers in the workforce. Despite substantial investment and rapid program diffusion, there is little evidence about the effectiveness of UTeach graduates. Using administrative data from the state of Texas, we measure the impact of having a UTeach teacher on student test scores in math and science in middle schools and high schools. We find that students taught by UTeach teachers perform significantly better on end-of-grade tests in math and end-of-course tests in math and science by 8% to 14% of a standard deviation on the test, depending on grade and subject.
Economics of Education Review, Jun 1, 2018
UTeach is a well-known, university-based program designed to increase the number of high-quality ... more UTeach is a well-known, university-based program designed to increase the number of high-quality science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teachers in the workforce. The UTeach program was originally developed by faculty at the University of Texas at Austin but has rapidly spread and is now available at 44 universities in 21 states; it is expected to produce more than 9,000 math and science teachers by 2020. Despite substantial investment and rapid program diffusion, there is little evidence to date about the effectiveness of UTeach graduates. Using administrative data from the state of Texas, we measure UTeach impacts on student test scores in math and science in middle schools and high schools. We find that students taught by UTeach teachers perform significantly better on end-ofgrade tests in math and end-of-course tests in math and science by 5% to 12% of a standard deviation on the test, depending on grade and subject. The effect is larger for the founding site at the University of Texas at Austin than for replication UTeach sites, with estimated upper bounds of additional months of learning for students taught by UTeach Austin graduates of 4.0 months in high school math and 5.7 months in high school science. Controlling for the selectivity of the undergraduate institution appears to explain the differential between Austin and replication UTeach sites, but not the overall difference between UTeach and non-UTeach teachers. 2 Garcia Mathewson, Tara. "NAEP: 4th, 8th grade science scores are up; 12th grade scores are flat." Education Dive.
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Jul 18, 2022
Considerable amount of research in educational data mining has focused on developing efficient al... more Considerable amount of research in educational data mining has focused on developing efficient algorithms for Knowledge Tracing (KT). However, in practice, many real-world learning systems used at scale struggle to implement KT capabilities, especially if they weren't originally designed for it. One key challenge is to accurately label existing items with skills, which often turns out to be a herculean task. In this paper, we investigate whether an increasingly popular approach to knowledge tracing, the use of neural network models, can be a partial solution to this problem. We conducted a case study within a commercial math blended learning system. Using the data collected from middle school students' use of the system over two years, we compare the performance of a neural network-based KT model (DKVMN) in three scenarios: 1) with the original (possibly unreliable) system-provided skill tags, 2) with coarser-grained domain tags based on state standards, and 3) without inputting any mappings between content and skills. Our results suggest that including the system-provided skills in the training of the model leads to the worst performance. The best performance is observed when the skills are entirely disregarded. This supports the possibility of bypassing the laborious step of item-skill tagging in real-world learning systems which were not originally designed to work with KT models, especially if the goal is only to predict the performance of a student on future items. We discuss the implications of our findings for practice and future research.
While the impact of pedagogical agent pointing and dynamic visual aids in intelligent tutoring sy... more While the impact of pedagogical agent pointing and dynamic visual aids in intelligent tutoring systems has been evaluated by many researchers, there remains a question as to how the combination of the two can impact a student's learning and agent perceptions. In this study, 34 university students were exposed to four Biology lectures delivered by a lifelike agent. The impact of two attentional guiding techniques (agent pointing and sequential image display) on students' opinions of the agent, learning, and gaze behavior were investigated. Agent pointing had no effect on perception of the agent or learning. Sequential display was found to increase student perceptions of lesson easiness and arousal but had no effect on learning. Both agent pointing and sequential display impacted the gaze patterns. These results are consonant with previous work on the effects of pointing, but depart from the image display literature where attentionguiding techniques normally improve learning.
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 2021
Abstract A focus on intraindividual change and person-specific pathways is a necessary starting p... more Abstract A focus on intraindividual change and person-specific pathways is a necessary starting point for developmental science inquiries. However, research often relies on ergodicity-based assumptions about group averages and other variable-centered approaches. Using ideas associated with relational developmental systems metatheory, such as the Bornstein Specificity Principle, we re-examine the ergodicity assumption using Executive Functioning (EF) data from the Measures and Methods Across the Developmental Continuum Project. Participants from Grades 4 to 12 (M age = 14.60) completed three behavioral EF tasks (i.e., working memory, response inhibition, and cognitive flexibility). The final analytic sample included 64 participants who provided data on 30 measurement occasions. Intraindividual and interindividual EF latent constructs appeared to be different, and we identified a wide range of person-specific EF trajectories. These findings challenge the ergodicity assumption framing variable- and group-oriented approaches to individual development. This study demonstrates the feasibility of collecting intensive longitudinal data to understand youth development on an individual level as an alternative to immediate data aggregation and as means to illuminate the use of the specificity principle in understanding human development and in applications pertinent to enhancing the lives of diverse youth across specific times and places in their specific developmental pathways.
Texas Education Research Center, May 1, 2019
Journal for Person-Oriented Research, 2022
The purpose of this study was to investigate within- and between-person associations between slee... more The purpose of this study was to investigate within- and between-person associations between sleep and subsequent goal setting in adolescents. We conducted an intensive repeated measures longitudinal study to assess intra- and interindividual associations between sleep and goal setting and potential moderators of such associations. Thirty-nine seventh through 12th graders reported on their sleep quality and propensity to set goals in their daily lives several times per week for approximately four months. We used a combination of multilevel modeling with time-varying covariates and centering techniques to partition within- and between-person variance. We found significant and positive associations between sleep and goal setting within individuals, but no such associations between individuals. That is, students were more likely to set goals for their work after getting a good night’s sleep relative to their own average sleep quality, but getting good sleep on average relative to other...
According to the Department of Education, there are more than 2,000 teacher preparation programs ... more According to the Department of Education, there are more than 2,000 teacher preparation programs (TPPs) in the United States1, but despite these numbers, concerns remain about the quality and quantity of STEM teachers in the workforce. For instance, Augustine (2007) finds that 61% of chemistry teachers and 67% of physics teachers did not major in and/or receive certification in their topic area (Augustine, 2007), and thus may not have the same content knowledge as a teacher who specialized in that topic. Furthermore, 20-30% of schools reported difficulties finding and employing STEM teachers between 2000 and 2012 (Cowan et al., 2016).
Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, 2018
Whitney Layne Cade granted permission for the digitization of her paper. It was submitted by CD
Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction, 2013
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
... Whitney L. Cade1, Jessica L. Copeland1, Natalie K. Person1, and Sidney K. D&#... more ... Whitney L. Cade1, Jessica L. Copeland1, Natalie K. Person1, and Sidney K. D'Mello2 ... Feltovich, PJ, Spiro, RJ, Coulson, RL: The nature of conceptual understanding in bio-medicine: The deep structure of complex ideas and the development of misconceptions. ...
Natalie Person, served on nearly all of my milestone committees and always had insightful comment... more Natalie Person, served on nearly all of my milestone committees and always had insightful comments, an editorial eye, and good jokes, and for that I thank you. I would also like to recognize my real family and my IIS family, who supported me through the process of getting my degrees. Without you, none of this would be possible and it certainly would have been less fun. The biggest thanks goes to Patrick Hays, who kept me motivated until the end, listened to all of my data woes and triumphs, and stopped me from taking any of it too seriously. I made it through graduate school only because of you, and there are no words to express how much you have meant to me.
Economics of Education Review
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Innovative Use of Nlp For Building Educational Applications, Jun 24, 2011
... Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 111119, Portl... more ... Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pages 111119, Portland, Oregon, 24 June 2011. cO2011 Association for Computational Linguistics Generating Concept Map Exercises from Textbooks Andrew M. Olney, Whitney L. Cade, and Claire ...
Being able to monitor collaborative learning environments using unobtrusive measures is crucial t... more Being able to monitor collaborative learning environments using unobtrusive measures is crucial to maximizing students’ socioaffective experiences with a system. This analysis uses the cohesion of student responses to model students’ feelings of power and connectedness to the group, two factors which emerge from a principal component analysis of a motivational survey.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015
While many aspects of tutoring have been identified and studied, off topic conversation has been ... more While many aspects of tutoring have been identified and studied, off topic conversation has been largely ignored. In this paper, off topic conversation during 50 hours of one-to-one expert tutoring sessions was analyzed. Two distinct methodologies (Dialogue Move occurrence and LIWC analysis) were used to determine the anatomy of off topic conversation. Both analyses revealed that the expected social talk occurred, but pedagogically-relevant talk emerged as well. These occurrences may reflect the discussion of more global pedagogical strategies. These findings suggest that off topic conversation may serve a useful purpose in tutoring and that further investigation is warranted.
In a corpus of expert tutoring dialogue, conversation that is considered to be "off topic&qu... more In a corpus of expert tutoring dialogue, conversation that is considered to be "off topic" (non-pedagogical) according to a previous coding scheme is explored for its value in tutoring dynamics. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool, phases of tutoring categorized as "off topic" were compared with interactive problem solving phases to explore how the two differ on the emotional, psychological, and topical dimensions analyzed by LIWC. The results suggest that conversation classified as "off topic" serves as motivation and broad pedagogy in tutoring. These findings can be used to orient future research on "off topic" conversation, and help to make sense of both previous coding schemes and noisy data sets.
In a corpus of expert tutoring dialogue, conversation that is considered to be "off topic" (non-p... more In a corpus of expert tutoring dialogue, conversation that is considered to be "off topic" (non-pedagogical) according to a previous coding scheme is explored for its value in tutoring dynamics. Using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) tool, phases of tutoring categorized as "off topic" were compared with interactive problem solving phases to explore how the two differ on the emotional, psychological, and topical dimensions analyzed by LIWC. The results suggest that conversation classified as "off topic" serves as motivation and broad pedagogy in tutoring. These findings can be used to orient future research on "off topic" conversation, and help to make sense of both previous coding schemes and noisy data sets.