Lindsay C. Page

University of Pittsburgh | Pitt · Department of Administrative and Policy Studies

Policy makers periodically consider using student assignment policies to improve educational outcomes by altering the socio-economic and academic skill composition of schools. We exploit the quasi-random reassignment of students across schools in the Wake County Public School System to estimate the academic and behavioral effects of being reassigne...

In a clustered observational study, a treatment is assigned to groups and all units within the group are exposed to the treatment. We develop a new method for statistical adjustment in clustered observational studies using approximate balancing weights, a generalization of inverse propensity score weights that solve a convex optimization problem to...

In education settings, treatments are often non-randomly assigned to clusters, such as schools or classrooms, while outcomes are measured for students. This research design is called the clustered observational study (COS). We examine the consequences of common support violations in the COS context. Common support violations occur when the covariat...

Despite high prices, many college students do not re-file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) or file late, making college less affordable. Low-cost technological interventions delivering personalized information and/or advising may improve refiling and academic outcomes, but questions remain regarding the efficacy of this approach...

The clustered observational study (COS) design is the observational study counterpart to the clustered randomized trial. In a COS, a treatment is assigned to intact groups, and all units within the group are exposed to the treatment. However, the treatment is non-randomly assigned. COSs are common in both education and health services research. In...

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-021-09635-x

We investigate the efficacy of text messaging campaigns to support students with key steps in the college search, application, selection and transition process with concurrent cluster randomized control trials. Collaborating with national non-profit organizations, we implemented text-message based outreach to students in the high school graduating...

We explore the role of defaults and choice architecture on student loan decision-making, experimentally testing the impact pre-populating either decline or accept decisions compared to an active choice, no pre-population, decision. We demonstrate that the default choice presented does influence student loan borrowing decisions. Specifically, compar...

Many interventions in education occur in settings where treatments are applied to groups. For example, a reading intervention may be implemented for all students in some schools and withheld from students in other schools. When such treatments are nonrandomly allocated, outcomes across the treated and control groups may differ due to the treatment...

Net Price Calculators (NPCs) are online tools designed to increase transparency in college pricing by presenting students with individualized estimates of net prices to attend a given postsecondary institution. The federal template NPC predicts identical aid awards for similarly-profiled students attending the same institution. Using the 2012 Natio...

Verification is a federally mandated process that requires selected students to further attest that the information reported on their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is accurate and complete. In this brief, we estimate institutional costs of administrating the FAFSA verification mandate and consider variation in costs by institutio...

Our field experiment extends prior work on college matriculation by testing the extent to which an artificially intelligent (AI) chatbot’s outreach and support to college students (N = 4442) reduced summer melt and improved first-year college enrollment at a 4-year university. Specifically, we investigate which students the intervention proves most...

Clustered observational studies (COSs) are a critical analytic tool for educational effectiveness research. We present a design framework for the development and critique of COSs. The framework is built on the counterfactual model for causal inference and promotes the concept of designing COSs that emulate the targeted randomized trial that would h...

Exercise provides a robust physiological stimulus that evokes cross-talk among multiple tissues that when repeated regularly (i.e., training) improves physiological capacity, benefits numerous organ systems, and decreases the risk for premature mortality. However, a gap remains in identifying the detailed molecular signals induced by exercise that...

Informational and behavioral barriers hinder social benefit take-up. We investigate the impact of mitigating these barriers through providing personalized information on benefits application status and application assistance on filing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), the gateway to college financial aid. Through a multidistrict...

English-only college education in non-English speaking countries is a rapidly growing phenomenon that has been dubbed as the most important trend in higher education internationalization. Despite worldwide popularity, there is little empirical evidence about how the transition to English-only instruction affects students’ academic outcomes. Using a...

Although text messaging interventions targeting parents of older students have shown promise for improving a variety of outcomes, evidence on text-based outreach and support for parents of young children is just emerging. We explore programmatic data from a text-based mentoring intervention designed to support postpartum mothers and promote healthy...

Many observational studies of causal effects occur in settings with clustered treatment assignment. In studies of this type, treatment is applied to entire clusters of units. For example, an educational intervention might be administered to all the students in a school. We develop a matching algorithm for multilevel data based on a network flow alg...

This article synthesizes findings from a reanalysis of data from the Head Start Impact Study with a focus on impact variation. This study addressed whether the size of Head Start’s impacts on children’s access to center-based and high-quality care and their school readiness skills varied by child characteristics, geographic location, and the experi...

Class size reduction represents an appealing but costly education policy lever. A crucial question, therefore, is whether certain types of students benefit particularly from small classes, i.e. are there effect modifiers for the benefit of small classes? We use data from the Tennessee ‘Student/teacher achievement ratio’ study, which is a large rand...

Poor school attendance in the early grades is predictive of poor subsequent educational outcomes. We report on a pilot intervention aiming to reduce chronic absenteeism in kindergarten. We designed and implemented a two-way, text-based parent-school communication system to encourage daily attendance, provide parents with personalized feedback on th...

Interactive tool illustrates how to calculate the bounds for principal causal effects (as discussed in Miratrix , Fuery, Feller, Grindal, & 2017). The bounds identify the range of possible values of the principal causal effects that are consistent with the observed data. While the calculations needed to solve for the bounds are relatively straightf...

Place-based promise scholarships are a relatively recent innovation in the space of college access and success. Although evidence on the impact of some of the earliest place-based scholarships has begun to emerge, the rapid proliferation of promise programs largely has preceded empirical evidence of their impact. We utilize regression discontinuity...

Substantial teacher turnover poses a challenge to staffing public schools with effective teachers. The scope of the teacher retention challenge across school districts, however, remains poorly defined. Applying consistent data practices and analytical techniques to administrative data sets from 16 urban districts, we document substantial cross-dist...

Deep reinforcement learning using convolutional neural networks is the technology behind autonomous vehicles. Could this same technology facilitate the road to college? During the summer between high school and college, college-related tasks that students must navigate can hinder successful matriculation. We employ conversational artificial intelli...

Research increasingly points to the importance of parental engagement in children’s education. Yet, little research has investigated whether prompting parents to be more involved in college processes improves student outcomes. We investigate experimentally whether providing both students and their parents with personalized outreach about tasks stud...

Advanced math coursework can affect college and labor market outcomes, yet discretionary placement policies can lead to differential access at key points in the college preparatory pipeline. We examine a targeted approach to course assignment that uses prior test scores to identify middle school students deemed qualified for a college preparatory m...

Subtle policy adjustments can induce relatively large “ripple effects.” We evaluate a College Board initiative that increased the number of free SAT score reports available to low-income students and changed the time horizon for using these score reports. Using a difference-in-differences analytic strategy, we estimate that targeted students were r...

Concerns about the rate of postsecondary attainment in the US compared to the projected education requirements of future jobs has prompted a range of policy and practice interventions aimed at barriers to postsecondary access and success. As both a largely local phenomenon and a complex systems issue, improving postsecondary attainment for all stud...

Estimating treatment effects for subgroups defined by post-treatment behavior (i.e., estimating causal effects in a principal stratification framework) can be technically challenging and heavily reliant on strong assumptions. We investigate an alternate path: using bounds to identify ranges of possible effects that are consistent with the data. Thi...

Early childhood education research often compares a group of children who receive the intervention of interest to a group of children who receive care in a range of different care settings. In this paper, we estimate differential impacts of an early childhood intervention by alternative care type, using data from the Head Start Impact Study, a larg...

In this paper we investigate, through a randomized controlled trial design, the impact of a personalized text messaging intervention designed to encourage college freshmen to refile their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and maintain their financial aid for sophomore year. The intervention produced large and positive effects among f...

The summer melt and academic mismatch literatures have focused largely on college-ready, low-income students. Yet, a broader population of students may also benefit from additional support in formulating and realizing their college plans. We investigate the impact of a unique high school-university partnership to support college-intending students...

Although college enrollment rates have increased substantially over the last several decades, socioeconomic inequalities in college completion have actually widened over time. A critical question, therefore, is how to support low-income and first-generation students to succeed in college after they matriculate. We investigate the impact of the Mich...

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Increasingly, researchers are interested in questions regarding treatment-effect variation across partially or fully latent subgroups defined not by pretreatment characteristics but by postrandomization actions. One promising approach to address such questions is principal stratification. Under this framework, a researcher defines endogenous subgro...

To better prepare students for college-level math and the demands of the labor market, school systems have tried to increase the rigor of students' math coursework. The failure of universal "Algebra for All" models has led recently to more targeted approaches. We study one such approach in Wake County, North Carolina, which began using prior test s...

The summer melt and academic mismatch literatures have focused largely on college-ready, low-income students. Yet, a broader population of students may also benefit from additional support in formulating and realizing their college plans. We investigate the impact of a unique high school-university partnership to support college-intending students...

Taking algebra by eighth grade is considered an important milestone on the pathway to college readiness. We highlight a collaboration to investigate one district’s effort to increase middle school algebra course-taking. In 2010, the Wake County Public Schools began assigning middle school students to accelerated math and eighth-grade algebra based...

High levels of teacher turnover pose a critical challenge to the goal of staffing public schools with effective teachers. To date, though, differences in the scope of the teacher retention challenge across states and districts have remained poorly defined. Using consistent data practices and analytical techniques, we examine administrative data fro...

Several recent low-cost interventions demonstrate that simplifying information about college and financial aid and helping students access professional assistance can generate substantial improvements in students’ postsecondary outcomes. We build on this growing literature by investigating the impact of two applications of behavioral principles to...

We examine whether the legal decision to grant unitary status to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, which led to the end of race-conscious student assignment policies, increased the probability that families with children enrolled in the district would move to neighborhoods with a greater proportion of student residents of the same race as...

Despite decades of policy intervention to increase college entry and success among low-income students, considerable gaps by socioeconomic status remain. To date, policymakers have overlooked the summer after high school as an important time period in students’ transition to college, yet recent research documents high rates of summer attrition from...

Early childhood education research often compares a group of children who receive the intervention of interest to a group of children who receive care in a range of different care settings. In this paper, we estimate differential impacts of an early childhood intervention by alternative care setting, using data from the Head Start Impact Study, a l...

Despite decades of policy intervention to increase college entry among low-income students, substantial inequalities in college going by family income remain. Policy makers have largely overlooked the summer after high school as an important time period in students' transition to college. During the post-high school summer, however, students must c...

Strategic Performance Indicators (SPIs) are summary measures derived from parallel, descriptive analyses conducted across educational agencies. The SPIs are designed to inform agency management and efforts to improve student outcomes. We developed the SPIs to reveal patterns common across partner agencies, to highlight exceptions to those patterns,...

Objectives The object of this study was to examine whether college-intending, low-income high school graduates are particularly susceptible to having their postsecondary education plans change, or even fall apart, during the summer after high school graduation. College access research has largely overlooked this time period. Yet, previous research...

Experimental evaluations are increasingly common in the U.S. educational policy-research context. Often, in investigations of multifaceted interventions, researchers and policymakers alike are interested in not only whether a given intervention impacted an outcome but also why. What features of the intervention led to the impacts observed, or what...

Results from MDRC's longitudinal, random-assignment evaluation of career-academy high schools reveal that several years after high-school completion, those randomized to receive the academy opportunity realized a $175 (11%) increase in monthly earnings, on average. In this paper, I investigate the impact of duration of actual academy enrollment, as...

We decompose black-white achievement gap trends between 1971 and 2004 into trends in within- and between-school differences. We show that the previous finding that narrowing within-school inequality explains most of the decline in the black-white achievement gap between 1971 and 1988 is sensitive to methodology. Employing a more detailed partition...

This study employs methods of grounded theory and correlational analyses to examine how components of project-based learning (PjBL) - such as small group work, hands-on activities, interdisciplinary teaching, and "real world" connections - impact students', particularly women's, interest in and attitudes about an introductory engineering curriculum...