From Baseball to International Student Assessments
November 2, 2012
UW–Madison education professor David Kaplan is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, which includes major and minor league baseball officials, broadcasters and writers, historians, analysts, and former players. He has published quantitative studies of baseball. He’s ready at any time to discuss batting averages, earned run averages, on-base percentage, scoring index, or value approximation methods.
And as much as he’d enjoy being a professional baseball statistician, Kaplan decided he’d be better off in a career in educational psychology, with emphasis in statistics. His current program of research focuses on Bayesian statistical methods for experimental, quasi-experimental, and observational studies in education. Kaplan’s collaborative research involves applications of advanced quantitative methodologies to problems in educational psychology, human development, and international comparative education.
As part of the latter he has served since 2004 on committees for the international PISA study. PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, aims to evaluate education systems worldwide. It's a project of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) which promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. Every three years PISA assesses 15-year-olds' competencies in reading, mathematics and science. To date over 70 countries and economies have participated in PISA. Kaplan has been a member of the PISA Technical Advisory Group, and more recently the Questionnaire Expert Group.
One result of that collaboration is a study he conducted with Sociology graduate student Alyn Turner. Their research examined possible ways to statistically link PISA scores with those from another international educational assessment called TALIS (Teaching and Learning International Survey). The Kaplan-Turner study provided a proof of concept that statistically matching PISA and TALIS data is feasible for students, teachers, and schools.
Their paper demonstrates how to statistically combine TALIS and PISA to more carefully and universally describe school systems, with the intent of reporting associations between performance, equality, and educational policy, and how these factors combine to produce asocial system that can be described from the perspective of families, students, school staff, and school administrators (Statistical Matching of PISA 2009 and TALIS 2008 Data in Iceland, OECD Working Papers No. 78, 2012).
This year Kaplan and colleagues at the German Institute for International Educational Research (Frankfurt) used TALIS data to examine two connected areas of professional teacher practices in 23 participating countries: classroom teaching practices and participation in professional learning communities. Their study questions whether the pedagogical knowledge base of teachers is still in tune with recent advancements in learning research and with new skills that society expects from students.
They conclude that the main driver for advancement is developing a large repertoire of classroom teaching practices as well as taking collective responsibility and working cooperatively to improve instruction. The report recommends that teachers who are less involved in these activities should especially be the focus of policy and onsite interventions (Teaching Practices and Pedagogical Innovation: Evidence from TALIS, 2012, OECD Publishing).
Standing at the coffee pot, Kaplan is happy to talk at length about these projects. He’s also happy to talk about basic pitch count estimators, defensive efficiency records, fielding percentages, and slugging percentages.
