Research

Zid Niel Mancenido

In addition to the research I led at the Australian Education Research Organisation and have conducted as a consultant with the World Bank, I have undertaken the following personal research projects.

In-Progress

Exploring Careers in Education. I am running a randomised controlled trial with a colleagues at Harvard University investigating the effect of engaging with an experienced mentor teacher on the decision to become a teacher. Research suggests that one potential pathway to increase the supply of high achieving teacher candidates is to provide more opportunities for students to shape their beliefs and address their concerns about teaching through conversations with experienced educators. As such, we've randomly assigned college sophomores and juniors with demonstrated interests in education to a series of conversations with mentor teachers. Our outcome measures include post-college recruitment into teacher education programs (e.g., TFA, HGSE’s TTL, other post-baccalaureate programs degrees), as well as other teaching positions in schools and other youth-serving organizations.

Completed

Research Design for Teacher Education. I worked with Prof. Heather Hill (Harvard) and Prof. Susanna Loeb (Brown) on a NSF grant, Reconstructing Research in Teacher Education to Provide Usable Knowledge and Support Teacher Education Improvement (Award #1920616). The aim of the grant is to support improvements in measurement and evaluation in the field of teacher education. This includes: 

The Effects of Summer Math Programs. I worked with Dr. Kathleen Lynch (UConn) and Lily An (Harvard) on a meta-analysis of 37 experimental and quasi-experimental studies of summer programs in mathematics for children in grades pre-K-12, examining what resources and characteristics relate to stronger student achievement, attainment, and social-emotional and behavioral outcomes. We find an average weighted impact estimate of +0.09 standard deviations on mathematics achievement outcomes paper. In a parallel meta-analysis, we found similar positive impacts of summer programs on social emotional and behavioral outcomes paper. 

We also have examined trends in kindergarten children’s summer enrichment activities over time by socioeconomic status and race. Although we find that persistent inequalities characterize many of these experiences, there are some promising trends, including small shifts upward in summer home academic activities paper.

Measuring Uptake in Teacher-Student Interactions. I worked on a team led by Dorottya Demszky (Stanford) on a project investigating the use of machine learning techniques to measure and improve at scale teachers’ skills in building on the contributions of their students by, for example, acknowledging, repeating or asking a question about what they have said. After applying our measure to three different educational datasets, we find that it correlates positively with instruction quality and student feedback, providing evidence for its generalizability and for its potential to serve as an automated professional development tool for teachers (paper here). 

The team extended this work by creating and releasing an annotated dataset of 2,348 teacher utterances labeled for types responsive teaching (i.e. "funneling" vs "focusing" questions, or neither). We introduce supervised and unsupervised approaches to differentiating these questions. Our best model, a supervised RoBERTa model fine-tuned on our dataset, has a strong linear correlation of .76 with human expert labels and with positive educational outcomes, including math instruction quality and student achievement, showing the model's potential for use in automated teacher feedback tools paper.

Recruiting High-Achievers into Teaching. I interviewed high-achieving college students and advocates for teaching on elite campuses to understand what attracts and deters high-achievers from pursuing teaching. The aim was to identify practical policies that school systems and teacher preparation programs can implement to improve incoming teacher quality. Key findings are:

  • that career exploration and decision-making is heavily social; it is strongly influenced by family, friends, mentors, previous teachers, etc. In this way, becoming interested and committed to teaching is a social process. People need to feel like they have the support of those around them, support that might be culturally contingent given immigrant status, race/ethnicity, family experience with higher education, etc. Read more about Recruiting Better Teachers and the Teacher Recruiting Study.
  • that there are key influencers in high-achievers' lives that can encourage them into choosing teaching as a career. These influencers provide high-achievers with the conversations and experiences that help legitimize teaching as a career option in the two page Teacher Recruiter Study document.

Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

  • I developed high-quality, user-friendly resources to help professors understand key evidence-based pedagogical moves that improve student learning (Instructional Moves).
  • I wrote a white paper exploring the roles and responsibilities of elite liberal arts colleges in advancing the public good for the 2019 Harvard Summit on Excellence in Higher Education: Exploring Our Contributions to the Public Good.

Preparing Teachers for Family Engagement.

  • I have previously been an Educator Preparation in Family Engagement Fellow for the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement, supporting the work of the Pre-Service Family Engagement Consortium.
  • I have written a comprehensive literature review of published peer-reviewed research evaluating interventions aimed at improving pre-service teacher preparation for family engagement. Broadly, I find few studies that adhere to rigorous standards for causal evaluation; few studies that focus on developing pre-service teachers' skills for family engagement; and few studies focused on preparing secondary school teachers paper.

Preparing Teachers using Mixed-Reality Simulations.

  • In collaboration with Dr. Rhonda Bondie (Harvard) and Dr. Chris Dede (Harvard), I have written a literature review investigating the design of mixed-reality simulations to accelerate the development of teacher learning paper.