Dr. Benjamin Shear Gives Keynote Address at Inaugural IDSR PhD Seminar Series
Scales of Educational Opportunity: Using Administrative Test Score Data to Study Educational Opportunity in the US
Friday, May 28, 2021
Dr. Shear (University of Colorado, Boulder) discussed the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), a publicly available dataset containing information about student achievement for nearly all US public school districts. The data are available to researchers and the public at their website. The talk briefly described the origin and features of the data, and then summarized recent research studies drawing on the data. The discussion considered some key features of the test score data reported in SEDA, including the differences between accountability and monitoring uses of test scores, interpretations of scores as measures of opportunity, and the importance of including measures of change over time. Finally, the discussion considered how the psychometric concepts of reliability and validity have guided different aspects of the SEDA construction process, and can be used when developing or evaluating public indicator systems in other contexts.