The Trusted Source for Emerging Education Research
Researchers and policymakers can both benefit from timely access to research. EdWorkingPapers is a platform for prompt and open dissemination of high-quality studies. By connecting researchers and informing policymakers, the series accelerates progress in education.
Learn more about the platform →
Submit a paper
Have a paper you wish to post? Check out the EdWorkingPapers' scope and FAQs, and then submit your manuscript.
NEW EdWorkingPapers
(How) Do We Teach Emotions?
Emotional intelligence constitutes a key component of human capital, shaped partially by educational materials. Using machine learning and generative AI tools, we examine emotional content in public-school textbooks and children’s literature. A stark mismatch emerges: text exposes children to a broad emotional range, but images overwhelmingly depict happiness and calm, regardless of emotions… more →
"How You Spend Your Money is Your Strategy": Education Spending and the Academic Achievement of Students with and without Disabilities in Virginia, 2018-2025
Virginia experienced a boost in federal and state education funding from 2020-2025 and launched the Virginia Literacy Act in 2023. These policy events prompted our study of the impact of education spending by school divisions on growth in academic pass rates in reading and mathematics for students with and without disabilities in grades three through eight (2018-2025). To do this, we estimated… more →
Is Calculus a Gatekeeper in Selective Engineering Admissions? Insights from a Lab-in-the-Field Experiment with Admissions Officers
Lower-resourced high schools are far less likely to offer calculus, raising concerns that calculus availability may be a gatekeeper in selective college admissions. Using a lab-in-the-field experiment (292 admissions officers, 1768 total observations), we investigate whether engineering applicants are penalized for not taking calculus—even when it was unavailable to them. We also investigate… more →
Post-pandemic achievement recovery based on student characteristics and district-level policies
It is well-established that student achievement has declined dramatically since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, less is known how these patterns may vary by developmental timing of exposure to the pandemic and how district-level policies may have influenced student recovery.
Shine a Light: The U.S. Federal Government Should Increase Access to Educational Administrative Data
The Institute of Educational Sciences invested substantial resources into the Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems grant program. These grants helped states convert their educational records to longitudinal datasets for research and evaluation. However, external researchers still have unreliable access to these datasets. In this commentary, we argue that the U.S. federal government should use… more →
Leveraging complementarities between teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical supports: Experimental evidence from India
We evaluate whether pairing strong subject-matter knowledge with pedagogical supports can improve learning in public primary schools. In Pune, India, we randomly assigned grades within 48 schools to an intervention that recruited college students in science, technology, engineering, and math (“fellows”), supported them with training, coaching, and scripts, and had them partly replace math and… more →
Policy and Practice Series
EdTalks
Centering Teachers in the AI Era
What happens when teachers are treated as professional decision-makers, not just end users of AI tools?
Watch the conversation about the future of the teaching profession in an AI-enabled education system, grounded in two recent EdWorkingPapers.