Peter F. Halpin

The Importance of Minority Teachers: Student Perceptions of Minority Versus White Teachers

The demographic divide between teachers and students is of growing public concern. However, few studies have explicitly addressed the common argument that students, and particularly minority students, have more favorable perceptions of minority versus White teachers. Using data from the Measure of Effective Teaching study, we find that students perceive minority teachers more favorably than White teachers. There is mixed evidence that race matching is linked with more favorable student perceptions. These findings underscore the importance of minority teacher recruitment and retention.

Modelling Dyadic Interaction with Hawkes Processes

We apply the Hawkes process to the analysis of dyadic interaction. The Hawkes process is applicable to excitatory interactions, wherein the actions of each individual increase the probability of further actions in the near future. We consider the representation of the Hawkes process both as a conditional intensity function and as a cluster Poisson process. The former treats the probability of an action in continuous time via non-stationary distributions with arbitrarily long historical dependency, while the latter is conducive to maximum likelihood estimation using the EM algorithm. We first outline the interpretation of the Hawkes process in the dyadic context, and then illustrate its application with an example concerning email transactions in the work place.

Violence in the Massage Parlor Industry: Experiences of Canadian-Born and Immigrant Women

We examined and contrasted 129 Canadian-born and immigrant womens experiences of violence and associated structural and interpersonal factors within indoor commercial sex venues. The majority experienced at least one form of structural, interpersonal, or both types of violence, with the attempted removal of a condom during sexual services being cited most frequently. Canadian-born women reported more frequent violent assaults in the survey data. The womens qualitative narratives illustrated that perceptions of violence differed significantly among Canadian versus non-Canadian born women. Findings concerning racialization and gendered relations of power have important implications for prevention and interventions to support victims of abuse.

Manifest and Latent Variates

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Describing Profiles of Instructional Practice A New Approach to Analyzing Classroom Observation Data

The authors outline the application of latent class analysis (LCA) to classroom observational instruments. LCA offers diagnostic information about teachers’ instructional strengths and weaknesses, along with estimates of measurement error for individual teachers, while remaining relatively straightforward to implement and interpret. It is discussed how the methodology can support formative feedback to educators and facilitate research into the associations between instructional practices and student outcomes. The approach is illustrated with a secondary analysis of data from the Measures of Effective Teaching study, focusing on middle school literacy instruction.

On the Relation Between the Linear Factor Model and the Latent Profile Model

The relationship between linear factor models and latent profile models is addressed within the context of maximum likelihood estimation based on the joint distribution of the manifest variables. Although the two models are well known to imply equivalent covariance decompositions, in general they do not yield equivalent estimates of the unconditional covariances. In particular, a 2-class latent profile model with Gaussian components underestimates the observed covariances but not the variances, when the data are consistent with a unidimensional Gaussian factor model. In explanation of this phenomenon we provide some results relating the unconditional covariances to the goodness of fit of the latent profile model, and to its excess multivariate kurtosis. The analysis also leads to some useful parameter restrictions related to symmetry.

A Confirmatory Factor Analysis Approach to Test Anxiety

This article addresses the role of test anxiety in aptitude testing. Our approach is rooted in confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). We find that the usual parameter constraints used for model identification in CFA have nontrivial implications for the effects of interest. We suggest 2 methods for dealing with this identification problem. First, we consider testable parameter constraints that identify the proposed model. Second, we consider structural relations that do not depend on model identification. In particular we derive the partial factor correlation between a test and an external variable, conditional on test anxiety, and show that this correlation (a) is not affected by the choice of model identification constraints, and (b) can be estimated using true score theory.

A Scalable EM Algorithm for Hawkes Processes

Halpin and De Boeck (2013) considered the time series analysis of bivariate event data in the context of dyadic interaction. They proposed the use of point processes (e.g., Daley and Vere-Jones 2003), and in particular Hawkes processes (Hawkes 1971; Hawkes and Oakes 1974), as way to capture the temporal dependence between the actions of two individuals. Here an action is treated as an occurrence, which is a discrete event that is viewed as having negligible duration relative to the period of observation. Occurrences may be contrasted with events that are viewed as extended in time (e.g., states, regimes). Examples of occurrences during the course of a conversation include specific types of statements (e.g., criticism, questions, lies) or nonverbal behaviors (e.g., laughter, facial expressions, gestures). Point processes are especially well suited to cases where human interaction is mediated by technology (e.g., text-messaging, emailing, chatting, tweeting), because such interactions are naturally parsed as series of time-stamped events. We can also view interaction more broadly, including, say, a student’s interactions with an intelligent tutor, or a gamer’s interactions with a virtual agent. The fundamental idea is to represent an interaction as a series of discrete, instantaneous actions. The theory of point processes then provides a general statistical framework for modelling the timing of those actions—how their probability changes in continuous time, how this depends on previous actions, and how the actions of two or more people may be coordinated in time. The approach to estimation taken by Halpin and De Boeck (2013) was based on the so-called branching structure representation of the Hawkes process, which they showed to be amenable to the EM algorithm (see also Veen and Schoenberg 2008).

Impacts after One Year of "Healing Classroom" on Children's Reading and Math Skills in DRC: Results from a Cluster Randomized Trial.

ABSTRACT This article examines the effects of one year of exposure to “Learning to Read in a Healing Classroom” (LRHC) on the reading and math skills of second- to fourth-grade children in the low-income and conflict-affected Democratic Republic of the Congo. LRHC consists of two primary components: teacher resource materials that infuse social-emotional learning principles into a reading curriculum and collaborative school-based teacher learning circles to exchange information about and solve problems in using the teacher resource materials. To test the impact of LRHC on childrens reading and math skills, 40 school clusters containing 64 schools and 4,465 students were randomized to begin LRHC in 2011–2012 or to serve as wait-list controls. Hierarchical linear models (students nested in schools, nested in school clusters) were fitted. Results indicate marginally significant positive impacts on childrens reading scores (dwt = .14) and geometry scores (dwt = .14) but not on their addition/subtraction scores. These results should be treated with caution given the reported significance level of p < .10. The intervention had the largest impacts on math scores for language minority children and in low-performing schools. Research, practice, and policy implications for education in low-income conflict-affected countries are discussed.

Promoting children's learning and development in conflict-affected countries: Testing change process in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Improving childrens learning and development in conflict-affected countries is critically important for breaking the intergenerational transmission of violence and poverty. Yet there is currently a stunning lack of rigorous evidence as to whether and how programs to improve learning and development in conflict-affected countries actually work to bolster childrens academic learning and socioemotional development. This study tests a theory of change derived from the fields of developmental psychopathology and social ecology about how a school-based universal socioemotional learning program, the International Rescue Committees Learning to Read in a Healing Classroom (LRHC), impacts childrens learning and development. The study was implemented in three conflict-affected provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and employed a cluster-randomized waitlist control design to estimate impact. Using multilevel structural equation modeling techniques, we found support for the central pathways in the LRHC theory of change. Specifically, we found that LRHC differentially impacted dimensions of the quality of the school and classroom environment at the end of the first year of the intervention, and that in turn these dimensions of quality were differentially associated with child academic and socioemotional outcomes. Future implications and directions are discussed.