Paul Hanselman
Biographic Data
| ID | 3596820 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paul Hanselman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paul |
| FAMILY NAME | Hanselman |
| SIGNATURE | HANSELMAN P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Irvine |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1802-1830 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 135 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Efficiency-Equity Tradeoffs in Schools
School organizational decisions on resources and priorities shape the provision and distribution of learning opportunities, potentially creating conflicts between efficiency and equity. We evaluated this organizational efficiency-equity tradeoff hypothesis with statewide administrative data on elementary school students from one western state. We used value-added models of student achievement to generate annual estimates of schools’ (a) overall e…
Historical Patterns and Trends in Teacher-Student Demographic Changes in the United States
This visualization represents historical patterns and trends in racial/ethnic distributions of teachers and students over the past five decades in K–12 public schools in the United States. Specifically, the authors highlight the demographic mismatch between the school-age population and the teaching workforce that persists for all non-White groups. The rapidly diversifying, multiethnic school-age population highlighted by the 2020 census combined…
Role Models in Action Through YouTube Videos for Engineering Community College Students
Community colleges provide broad access to a college degree due to their less expensive tuition, greater course time offerings, and more open admission policies compared to four-year universities as reported (Juszkiewicz, 2015). These institutions have great potential to diversify who chooses STEM, such as engineering. Such diverse representation is important, because students from different backgrounds can contribute new perspectives that foster…
Context Variation in U.S. High Schoolers’ Mathematics Orientations
Educators increasingly recognize the importance of students’ learning orientations, but relatively little is known about how these mindsets vary across and potentially shape educational settings. We use nationally representative data to document contextual variation in mathematics orientations in U.S. high schools. We find systematic variation in orientations between differentiated course levels within school, suggesting orientations are more a f…
Educational Inequality Regimes amid Algebra-for-All
Schools can approach the task of sorting students to privileged learning opportunities in different ways, potentially creating distinct and durable educational inequality regimes. We test this idea by exploring variation in socioeconomic inequalities in advanced mathematics course-taking across California middle schools during a statewide algebra-for-all initiative. This case provides unique insight into local stratification processes since the s…
Reining in Punitive Discipline
Concerns around disparities in suspensions and expulsions from schools in the United States have resulted in a concerted effort to reduce the use of exclusionary school discipline. In this article, the authors describe trends in the use of exclusionary discipline in Indiana and Oregon, two U.S. states with different school discipline policy climates. The findings point to a substantial decline in the use of suspensions and other forms of exclusio…
How can we inspire nations of learners? An investigation of growth mindset and challenge-seeking in two countries
Here we evaluate the potential for growth mindset interventions (that teach students that intellectual abilities can be developed) to inspire adolescents to be "learners"-that is, to seek out challenging learning experiences. In a previous analysis, the U.S. National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) showed that a growth mindset could improve the grades of lower-achieving adolescents, and, in an exploratory analysis, increase enrollment in advanc…
Tournament Mobility in Mathematics Course-Taking Pathways
This visualization represents the structure of mathematics course opportunities as seen in the progress through middle and high school for one cohort of students in Texas. Trajectories are consistent with a tournament mobility regime in which there are repeated opportunities to fall behind but almost none to catch up. Pathways are also characterized by staggered starts, with differences in when students begin the mathematics sequence that have co…
A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement
A global priority for the behavioural sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset intervention—which teaches that intellectual abilities can be developed—improved grades among lower-achieving …
Beyond Tracking and Detracking
Schools use an array of strategies to match curricula and instruction to students' heterogeneous skills. Although generations of scholars have debated ''tracking'' and its consequences, the literature fails to account for diversity of school-level sorting practices. In this article, we draw on the work of Sørensen and others to articulate and develop empirical measures of five distinct dimensions of within-school cross-classroom tracking systems:…
Access to Effective Teachers and Economic and Racial Disparities in Opportunities to Learn
This paper provides detailed description of students' access to one critical educational resource, teachers that effectively promote learning. Using large scale administrative data from North Carolina in grades 3-8 and value-added measures of effectiveness, I find disadvantages for poor, American Indian, African American, and Hispanic students, but disparities represent less than 2% of observed achievement gaps. Gaps are driven by differential ri…
Self-Affirmation Effects Are Produced by School Context, Student Engagement With the Intervention, and Time
Self-affirmation shows promise for reducing racial academic-achievement gaps; recently, however, mixed results have raised questions about the circumstances under which the self-affirmation intervention produces lasting benefits at scale. In this follow-up to the first district-wide scale-up of a self-affirmation intervention, we examined whether initial academic benefits in middle school carried over into high school, we tested for differential …
Do School Learning Opportunities Compound or Compensate for Background Inequalities? Evidence from the Case of Assignment to Effective Teachers
Are equal educational opportunities sufficient to narrow long-standing economic and racial inequalities in achievement? In this article, I test the hypothesis that poor and minority students benefit less from effective elementary school teachers than do their nonpoor and white peers, thus exacerbating inequalities. I use administrative data from public elementary schools in North Carolina to calculate value-added measures of teachers' success in …
School Opportunity Hoarding? Racial Segregation and Access to High Growth Schools
Persistent school segregation may allow advantaged groups to hoard educational opportunities and consign minority students to lower-quality educational experiences. Although minority students are concentrated in low-achieving schools, relatively little previous research directly links segregation to measures of school quality based on student achievement growth, which more plausibly reflect learning opportunities. Using a dataset of public elemen…
Detracking and Tracking Up
Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth graders enrolled in algebra or a more advanced course nearly doubled to 65%. In this article, we consider the organizational processes that accompanied this curricular intensification. Facing a complex set of accountability, institutional, technical/functional, and internal political pressures, California schools responded to the algebra-for-all effort in diverse ways. While some schools …
New evidence on self-affirmation effects and theorized sources of heterogeneity from large-scale replications
Brief, targeted self-affirmation writing exercises have recently been offered as a way to reduce racial achievement gaps, but evidence about their effects in educational settings is mixed, leaving ambiguity about the likely benefits of these strategies if implemented broadly. A key limitation in interpreting these mixed results is that they come from studies conducted by different research teams with different procedures in different settings; it…
Professional Sense-Makers
This brief documents the expansion of instructional specialist staffing in U.S. public school districts. We use data from the National Center of Education Statistics’ annual Common Core of Data to chart staffing trends in public school districts between 1997–1998 and 2012–2013. The number of instructional specialists per 1,000 U.S students doubled during that period, and the proportion of districts employing no specialists declined from nearly 20…
Threat in Context
Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a randomized trial in all 11 middle schools in Madison, Wisconsin. We find that school context moderates …
New evidence on self-affirmation effects and theorized sources of heterogeneity from large-scale replications
Brief, targeted self-affirmation writing exercises have recently been offered as a way to reduce racial achievement gaps, but evidence about their effects in educational settings is mixed, leaving ambiguity about the likely benefits of these strategies if implemented broadly. A key limitation in interpreting these mixed results is that they come from studies conducted by different research teams with different procedures in different settings; it…
Self-Affirmation Effects Are Produced by School Context, Student Engagement With the Intervention, and Time
Self-affirmation shows promise for reducing racial academic-achievement gaps; recently, however, mixed results have raised questions about the circumstances under which the self-affirmation intervention produces lasting benefits at scale. In this follow-up to the first district-wide scale-up of a self-affirmation intervention, we examined whether initial academic benefits in middle school carried over into high school, we tested for differential …
Threat in Context
Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a randomized trial in all 11 middle schools in Madison, Wisconsin. We find that school context moderates …
Beyond Tracking and Detracking
Schools use an array of strategies to match curricula and instruction to students' heterogeneous skills. Although generations of scholars have debated ''tracking'' and its consequences, the literature fails to account for diversity of school-level sorting practices. In this article, we draw on the work of Sørensen and others to articulate and develop empirical measures of five distinct dimensions of within-school cross-classroom tracking systems:…
Detracking and Tracking Up
Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth graders enrolled in algebra or a more advanced course nearly doubled to 65%. In this article, we consider the organizational processes that accompanied this curricular intensification. Facing a complex set of accountability, institutional, technical/functional, and internal political pressures, California schools responded to the algebra-for-all effort in diverse ways. While some schools …
How can we inspire nations of learners? An investigation of growth mindset and challenge-seeking in two countries
Here we evaluate the potential for growth mindset interventions (that teach students that intellectual abilities can be developed) to inspire adolescents to be "learners"-that is, to seek out challenging learning experiences. In a previous analysis, the U.S. National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) showed that a growth mindset could improve the grades of lower-achieving adolescents, and, in an exploratory analysis, increase enrollment in advanc…
Do School Learning Opportunities Compound or Compensate for Background Inequalities? Evidence from the Case of Assignment to Effective Teachers
Are equal educational opportunities sufficient to narrow long-standing economic and racial inequalities in achievement? In this article, I test the hypothesis that poor and minority students benefit less from effective elementary school teachers than do their nonpoor and white peers, thus exacerbating inequalities. I use administrative data from public elementary schools in North Carolina to calculate value-added measures of teachers' success in …
Reining in Punitive Discipline
Concerns around disparities in suspensions and expulsions from schools in the United States have resulted in a concerted effort to reduce the use of exclusionary school discipline. In this article, the authors describe trends in the use of exclusionary discipline in Indiana and Oregon, two U.S. states with different school discipline policy climates. The findings point to a substantial decline in the use of suspensions and other forms of exclusio…
Professional Sense-Makers
This brief documents the expansion of instructional specialist staffing in U.S. public school districts. We use data from the National Center of Education Statistics’ annual Common Core of Data to chart staffing trends in public school districts between 1997–1998 and 2012–2013. The number of instructional specialists per 1,000 U.S students doubled during that period, and the proportion of districts employing no specialists declined from nearly 20…
Access to Effective Teachers and Economic and Racial Disparities in Opportunities to Learn
This paper provides detailed description of students' access to one critical educational resource, teachers that effectively promote learning. Using large scale administrative data from North Carolina in grades 3-8 and value-added measures of effectiveness, I find disadvantages for poor, American Indian, African American, and Hispanic students, but disparities represent less than 2% of observed achievement gaps. Gaps are driven by differential ri…
Tournament Mobility in Mathematics Course-Taking Pathways
This visualization represents the structure of mathematics course opportunities as seen in the progress through middle and high school for one cohort of students in Texas. Trajectories are consistent with a tournament mobility regime in which there are repeated opportunities to fall behind but almost none to catch up. Pathways are also characterized by staggered starts, with differences in when students begin the mathematics sequence that have co…
Threat in Context
Schools with very few and relatively low-performing marginalized students may be most likely to trigger social identity threats (including stereotype threats) that contribute to racial disparities. We test this hypothesis by assessing variation in the benefits of a self-affirmation intervention designed to counteract social identity threat in a randomized trial in all 11 middle schools in Madison, Wisconsin. We find that school context moderates …
Professional Sense-Makers
This brief documents the expansion of instructional specialist staffing in U.S. public school districts. We use data from the National Center of Education Statistics’ annual Common Core of Data to chart staffing trends in public school districts between 1997–1998 and 2012–2013. The number of instructional specialists per 1,000 U.S students doubled during that period, and the proportion of districts employing no specialists declined from nearly 20…
School Opportunity Hoarding? Racial Segregation and Access to High Growth Schools
Persistent school segregation may allow advantaged groups to hoard educational opportunities and consign minority students to lower-quality educational experiences. Although minority students are concentrated in low-achieving schools, relatively little previous research directly links segregation to measures of school quality based on student achievement growth, which more plausibly reflect learning opportunities. Using a dataset of public elemen…
Detracking and Tracking Up
Between 2003 and 2013, the proportion of California eighth graders enrolled in algebra or a more advanced course nearly doubled to 65%. In this article, we consider the organizational processes that accompanied this curricular intensification. Facing a complex set of accountability, institutional, technical/functional, and internal political pressures, California schools responded to the algebra-for-all effort in diverse ways. While some schools …
New evidence on self-affirmation effects and theorized sources of heterogeneity from large-scale replications
Brief, targeted self-affirmation writing exercises have recently been offered as a way to reduce racial achievement gaps, but evidence about their effects in educational settings is mixed, leaving ambiguity about the likely benefits of these strategies if implemented broadly. A key limitation in interpreting these mixed results is that they come from studies conducted by different research teams with different procedures in different settings; it…
Self-Affirmation Effects Are Produced by School Context, Student Engagement With the Intervention, and Time
Self-affirmation shows promise for reducing racial academic-achievement gaps; recently, however, mixed results have raised questions about the circumstances under which the self-affirmation intervention produces lasting benefits at scale. In this follow-up to the first district-wide scale-up of a self-affirmation intervention, we examined whether initial academic benefits in middle school carried over into high school, we tested for differential …
Do School Learning Opportunities Compound or Compensate for Background Inequalities? Evidence from the Case of Assignment to Effective Teachers
Are equal educational opportunities sufficient to narrow long-standing economic and racial inequalities in achievement? In this article, I test the hypothesis that poor and minority students benefit less from effective elementary school teachers than do their nonpoor and white peers, thus exacerbating inequalities. I use administrative data from public elementary schools in North Carolina to calculate value-added measures of teachers' success in …
A national experiment reveals where a growth mindset improves achievement
A global priority for the behavioural sciences is to develop cost-effective, scalable interventions that could improve the academic outcomes of adolescents at a population level, but no such interventions have so far been evaluated in a population-generalizable sample. Here we show that a short (less than one hour), online growth mindset intervention—which teaches that intellectual abilities can be developed—improved grades among lower-achieving …
Beyond Tracking and Detracking
Schools use an array of strategies to match curricula and instruction to students' heterogeneous skills. Although generations of scholars have debated ''tracking'' and its consequences, the literature fails to account for diversity of school-level sorting practices. In this article, we draw on the work of Sørensen and others to articulate and develop empirical measures of five distinct dimensions of within-school cross-classroom tracking systems:…
Access to Effective Teachers and Economic and Racial Disparities in Opportunities to Learn
This paper provides detailed description of students' access to one critical educational resource, teachers that effectively promote learning. Using large scale administrative data from North Carolina in grades 3-8 and value-added measures of effectiveness, I find disadvantages for poor, American Indian, African American, and Hispanic students, but disparities represent less than 2% of observed achievement gaps. Gaps are driven by differential ri…
How can we inspire nations of learners? An investigation of growth mindset and challenge-seeking in two countries
Here we evaluate the potential for growth mindset interventions (that teach students that intellectual abilities can be developed) to inspire adolescents to be "learners"-that is, to seek out challenging learning experiences. In a previous analysis, the U.S. National Study of Learning Mindsets (NSLM) showed that a growth mindset could improve the grades of lower-achieving adolescents, and, in an exploratory analysis, increase enrollment in advanc…
Tournament Mobility in Mathematics Course-Taking Pathways
This visualization represents the structure of mathematics course opportunities as seen in the progress through middle and high school for one cohort of students in Texas. Trajectories are consistent with a tournament mobility regime in which there are repeated opportunities to fall behind but almost none to catch up. Pathways are also characterized by staggered starts, with differences in when students begin the mathematics sequence that have co…
Educational Inequality Regimes amid Algebra-for-All
Schools can approach the task of sorting students to privileged learning opportunities in different ways, potentially creating distinct and durable educational inequality regimes. We test this idea by exploring variation in socioeconomic inequalities in advanced mathematics course-taking across California middle schools during a statewide algebra-for-all initiative. This case provides unique insight into local stratification processes since the s…
Reining in Punitive Discipline
Concerns around disparities in suspensions and expulsions from schools in the United States have resulted in a concerted effort to reduce the use of exclusionary school discipline. In this article, the authors describe trends in the use of exclusionary discipline in Indiana and Oregon, two U.S. states with different school discipline policy climates. The findings point to a substantial decline in the use of suspensions and other forms of exclusio…
Context Variation in U.S. High Schoolers’ Mathematics Orientations
Educators increasingly recognize the importance of students’ learning orientations, but relatively little is known about how these mindsets vary across and potentially shape educational settings. We use nationally representative data to document contextual variation in mathematics orientations in U.S. high schools. We find systematic variation in orientations between differentiated course levels within school, suggesting orientations are more a f…
Role Models in Action Through YouTube Videos for Engineering Community College Students
Community colleges provide broad access to a college degree due to their less expensive tuition, greater course time offerings, and more open admission policies compared to four-year universities as reported (Juszkiewicz, 2015). These institutions have great potential to diversify who chooses STEM, such as engineering. Such diverse representation is important, because students from different backgrounds can contribute new perspectives that foster…
Historical Patterns and Trends in Teacher-Student Demographic Changes in the United States
This visualization represents historical patterns and trends in racial/ethnic distributions of teachers and students over the past five decades in K–12 public schools in the United States. Specifically, the authors highlight the demographic mismatch between the school-age population and the teaching workforce that persists for all non-White groups. The rapidly diversifying, multiethnic school-age population highlighted by the 2020 census combined…
Efficiency-Equity Tradeoffs in Schools
School organizational decisions on resources and priorities shape the provision and distribution of learning opportunities, potentially creating conflicts between efficiency and equity. We evaluated this organizational efficiency-equity tradeoff hypothesis with statewide administrative data on elementary school students from one western state. We used value-added models of student achievement to generate annual estimates of schools’ (a) overall e…
Psychology (15 works) · School Choice and Performance (11 works) · Mathematics education (10 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Mathematics (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Higher Education Research Studies (6 works) · Pedagogy (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Inequality (5 works)