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Policy Briefs and White Papers by Michael Thier

OneWorld Now! (OWN) is an after-school program that focuses on global citizenship education by se... more OneWorld Now! (OWN) is an after-school program that focuses on global citizenship education by serving Seattle high school students with Arabic or Mandarin instruction, leadership coursework, and study abroad. A participatory program evaluation showed (a) OWN's leadership curriculum to align with most standards for promising and evidence-based practices, (b) a year of OWN's leadership coursework to associate with elevated levels of global citizenship on three measures , and (c) mixed results when comparing OWN's recruitment methods to a high school-specific definition for global citizenship development. We discuss OWN's status as a rare program to prioritize global citizenship and serve mostly economically disadvantaged students, plus opportunities for OWN to improve its design and theory.

In 2012, California Senate Bill 1458 added a measure of college and career preparedness to the Ac... more In 2012, California Senate Bill 1458 added a measure of college and career preparedness to the Academic Performance Index (API). The Public Schools Accountability Act Advisory Committee was charged with making recommendations to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education regarding measures that could serve as indicators of college and career preparedness at the high school level.

The Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) was commissioned to evaluate potential measures identified by the Committee. To do so, EPIC employed a criterion-based evaluation framework that focused on the technical quality, stakeholder
relevance, and system utility of each potential measure.

Five potential categories of measures were evaluated and reported in a series of white papers (and a sixth white paper examined multiple measures):
1. College admission exams
2. Advanced coursework
3. Innovative measures
4. Course-taking behavior
5. Career preparedness assessments

The EPIC evaluation leads to the recommendation that a measure of course-taking behavior would be the single best indicator that meets the evaluative criteria used and also has the greatest probability of leading to improvements in college and career
preparedness statewide.

Papers by Michael Thier

Responding to a groundswell of researcher and practitioner interest in developing students' inter... more Responding to a groundswell of researcher and practitioner interest in developing students' interpersonal and in-trapersonal skills, we evaluated three measurement approaches for creativity and global citizenship. We designed a 10-criteria evaluative framework from seminal and cutting-edge research to compare extant self-reports and situational-judgment tests (SJTs) from each construct and to design two discrete-choice experiments (DCEs). Our evaluation detailed opportunities, challenges, and tradeoffs presented by each approach's design considerations, possibilities for bias, and validity-related issues. We found that researchers rely heavily upon self-report instruments to measure constructs, such as creative thinking and global citizenship. We found evidence that the self-report instruments evaluated were susceptible to some biases more than others. We found that SJTs and DCEs may mitigate some concerns of bias and validity present in self-report when measuring inter-personal and intrapersonal skills. We make recommendations for future development of these formats.

Conducting international research presents unique possibilities for peril. Without understanding ... more Conducting international research presents unique possibilities for peril. Without understanding local context, culture, and norms, data-collection efforts may produce little usable data. This case study reports lessons learned about the importance of involving broad stakeholder groups in the design phase of a study. To inform the design of a 3-year study to examine the experiences of Qatari and Qatar-born female students in Education City, an international hub for higher education in Doha, Qatar, our research team spent 10 days in Education City in September 2015. We met with staff and faculty from across Education City campuses and conducted two focus groups. These meetings made it apparent that cultural and other contextual considerations would render our intended design-longitudinal data collection with student surveys alongside qualitative methods such as interviews or focus groups-suboptimal for collecting data from the population of interest. Thus, during a graffiti-style focus group, we solicited feedback on four additional proposed data sources and collection methods: student digital photo journals, alumnae interviews, parent focus groups, and staff/faculty surveys. This case study illuminates processes that enabled us to refine our study design for both cultural appropriateness and increased likelihood of generating valid, authentic data. Our lessons learned highlight the need to consider research participants' norms and values in research design.

Acculturation refers to the extent to which an individual immigrant (or immigrant group) acquires... more Acculturation refers to the extent to which an individual immigrant (or immigrant group) acquires the customs and characteristics of a new receiving society and/or retains the customs and characteristics of the person's or group's cultural heritage. Different acculturation measures are often assumed to be interchangeable, although this assumption is rarely tested empirically. The purpose of the present study was to examine the overlap between 2 commonly used measures of acculturation among individuals of Latino/Hispanic ancestry in the United States, the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans II (ARSMA-II) and the Bicultural Involvement Questionnaire-Short Version (BIQ-S). Specifically, we examined the ways in which scores from the 2 measures relate to one another, as well as similarities versus differences in the ways they predict external variables of interest (e.g., family functioning, parenting, and youth adjustment) that acculturation is known to influence. Findings indicate distinct patterns of results for the 2 measures. For instance, though the BIQ-S focuses entirely on language use and other cultural practices, the ARSMA-II more consistently relates to language variables. Further, adolescent BIQ-S cultural heritage scores related negatively to risks for and engagement in alcohol use-supporting prior findings-whereas ARSMA-II scores were unrelated to alcohol use. Given the largely nonoverlapping set of relationships of the BIQ-S and the ARSMA-II subscale scores with measures of language dominance and conflict, measures of parenting, and measures of youth outcomes, we recommend that studies utilize both of these measures to fully appraise acculturation in this population.

Many layers of education governance press upon U.S. schools, so we separated state actors into th... more Many layers of education governance press upon U.S. schools, so we separated state actors into those internal to and those external to the system. In the process, we unpacked the traditional state–local dichotomy. Using interview data (n = 45) from six case-study states, we analyzed local leaders', state-internal actors', and state-external players' perceptions of implementation flexibility and hindrances across several policy areas. We observed how interviewees' spheres of influence linked to which policy areas they viewed as salient or not, and their relative emphases on who and what within state education systems contributed to implementation flexibility and/or hindrances, and how these factors played out. We found important differences by sphere: the local sphere produced the most coherent findings, and state-internal was least coherent. We discuss implications for education governance research, applications for practitioners and policymakers, and a methodological contribution .

A high school teacher describes an assignment that draws on Hall's cultural iceberg to help stude... more A high school teacher describes an assignment that draws on Hall's cultural iceberg to help students develop global perspectives and better close-reading and analytical skills.