VEST Workshop with Dr. Brendan Bartanen

The focus of this workshop is open science as applied to educational research. Open Science is a movement in research designed to improve the transparency, integrity, accessibility, and reproducibility
of research. In this workshop, students will learn both theoretical knowledge and applied skills that prepare them to conduct high-quality research that is aligned with increasingly prevalent standards for open science. Topics include:

• Why is open science necessary? What are the benefits? Are there potential costs?
• How does the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) at the U.S. Department of Education establish standards for open science in their Standards for Excellence in Education Research (SEER)?
• Pre-registration and replication: what, why, when, and how?
• Applied tools for improving collaboration, transparency, and replication in research studies (e.g., Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, AEA pre-registration directory, Github, alternatives to Microsoft Word, pre-print servers/repositories, commonly used registries [e.g., REES, OSF]).
• Guest speakers (e.g., from UVA Center for Open Science, faculty involved in open science work)

Speaker Bio

Brendan Bartanen's research aims to increase our understanding of the labor market for principals and teachers. In particular, his work examines the intersections among educator turnover, measures of effectiveness, high-stakes evaluation systems, and educator diversity. He was awarded the 2019 New Scholar Award from the Association for Education Finance and Policy and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Educational Research Association (Division L). Bartanen is also a research affiliate of the Tennessee Education Research Alliance (TERA), a research-practice partnership between Vanderbilt University and the Tennessee Department of Education.
Bartanen's work has been published in leading journals across education, public policy, and economics, including the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, the Journal of Human Resources, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. His recently published work includes demonstrating the importance of principals for shaping the racial composition of a school's teaching staff, examining the validity and reliability of rubric-based observational evaluations of preservice teachers, and descriptively documenting rates of assistant principal mobility and their relationship with principal turnover. His current projects include race and gender biases in high-stakes teacher observations, the validity and reliability of principal value-added models, and the returns to principal experience.