1. Improving the Design of STEM Impact Studies: Considerations for Statistical Power
Discussant Notes
Cristofer Price
SREE

2. Theme for my notes
In the future, these conference presentations will be papers that you (today’s audience) can utilize when you are:
Planning / designing a study of impacts on STEM outcomes; or
Interpreting or contextualizing the results from a study with STEM outcomes
When we open up the symposium for discussion, what feedback can you give the authors today that will make their papers as useful as possible to YOU in your future endeavors?

3. Some takeaways Paper 1-- Effect sizes for teacher outcomes
Mean effect size = Few significant differences in variation by:
RCT/QED, publication type, discipline, dependent variable type, treatment components, test developer, duration, preservice vs in-service teachers, research design/quality
Paper 2 – ICCs and R2s for teacher outcomes
ICCs and R2s provide for multiple outcomes from multiple studies
ICCs and R2s vary a lot among outcomes and studies
Paper 3 – MDEs for studies with student and teacher outcomes
Expect that studies with MDES in range of for student outcomes would have MDESs in range of for teacher outcomes

4. How will YOU use the information about effect sizes for teacher STEM outcomes?
Paper 1 suggests that you might use them:
During the design phase power analyses (and suggests several options)
E.g., if average ES is .44, maybe you should plan your study to have power to detect effects on teacher outcomes that are in the ball park of .44.
E.g., use estimates provided to tweak the expected MDE, e.g. to = if you are planning an RCT
During the reporting phase
To contextualize your findings
When you imagine your future self using these results
Is there something else that the authors could have provided that would be useful to you?
Is there anything that they provide that you want to call out as being especially useful?

5. I could imagine my future self thinking…
…I want to design a study that is powered to detect substantively meaningful impacts on teacher STEM outcomes
I don’t care too much about detecting impacts smaller than that
What is a substantively meaningful impact on a teacher outcome?
It would be meaningful if the impact on teachers was big enough to be associated with impact on a student outcome of, say, .15 SD units
I wish those SREE papers could provide some info on how big the impacts on teachers were when the impact on students were 0.15 SD units or larger

6. Are there enough studies in the authors’ data set to relate teacher and student impacts?
If so, could you characterize how big teacher impacts were in studies where there impacts on student outcomes were found?
If so, could you present correlations or other descriptors of the relationships of teacher and student impacts?
If so, I would also love to see Paper 3’s results be updated to reflect the scenarios where we think the impacts on teachers would be big enough to be associated with impacts on students.

7. I could also imagine my future self thinking something like…
… I am designing an RCT to evaluate the impacts of an intervention on outcomes for physics teachers
I know that effect sizes for impacts on outcomes for physics teacher don’t differ much from the grand mean effect sizes, and those for RCTs where a bit bigger (estimate = .10), so maybe I expect that for the average intervention, the impact would be = .54.
I think I’m looking at a pretty good intervention, but what if it is actually below average? I wish I had some information about the distribution of effect sizes from studies that were like my study
e.g., the min, 25th percentile, 75 percentile, and the max.
(The funnel plot gives some sense of this for all of the studies)

8. I hope you are thinking about…
…what additional information these papers could provide that would be of use to your future self

9. When I’m designing a study to look at impacts on STEM teacher outcomes…
… my future self is going to use the results from Paper 2 to get plausible values of ICCs and R2s.
My future self might be wishing for:
R2s from another model, one with only covariates that are student pre-test and demographics aggregated to the teacher level
My future self may be hoping for more guidance on:
How to make use of the standard errors of ICCs?
How wide of a range should I use for ICC values?
Why do we think that the level-2 R2s (school-level) are often so much higher that the level-1 R2s (teacher-level)?

10. I could also imagine that it would be useful if the authors of Paper 2…
… used their data to approximate the design parameter information that would be needed to do power calculations for studies where teachers are assigned to T and C conditions within schools
If teachers were assigned to T and C conditions within schools, the schools would be “assignment blocks” and the ICC information could be used to approximate the proportion of variance explained by the assignment blocks.
Ultimately, IMHO, I think it would be useful to present the total proportion of teacher outcome variance explained by the blocks and all other covariates (teacher covariates, and students data aggregated to the teacher level)

11. I hope you are thinking about…
… whether you have any study data that you could contribute to the authors of Paper 2 to boost their data base and …what additional information these papers could provide that would be of use to your future self

12. If there enough studies in the authors’ data set to relate teacher and student impacts…
… then, as I already said, I would also love to see Paper 3’s results be updated to reflect the scenarios where we think the impacts on teachers would be big enough to be associated with impacts on students.
And, if Paper 2 were to present approximate design parameters for studies were teachers are assigned to T and C conditions within schools…
Then I think it could be useful if Paper 3 presented results corresponding to scenarios were teachers are assigned to T and C conditions within schools, and students are clustered within teachers.

13. I hope you are thinking about…
…what additional information these papers could provide that would be of use to your future self And That you are ready to start discussing those ideas!