- Eugene, OR, USA
- 5412143207
Michael Thier
University of Oregon, Educational Methodology, Policy, and Leadership, Graduate Student
- Michael Thier is a Research Associate at the Educational Policy Improvement Center and the Center for Equity Promotion. He collaborates with researchers in 10 countries, using m... moreMichael Thier is a Research Associate at the Educational Policy Improvement Center and the Center for Equity Promotion. He collaborates with researchers in 10 countries, using mixed methods to pursue three goals: (a) helping education leaders implement and measure global citizenship education (GCE) programs; (b) comparing GCE programs’ possibilities and constraints internationally/cross-culturally; and (c) discovering opportunities and conditions that enable students, especially attendees of rural and/or remote schools, to avail themselves of GCE programs. He has published in journals such as Learning and Individual Differences; Psychological Assessment; Educational Technology, Research and Development; and SAGE Research Methods Cases. Thier’s research has won awards from the American Educational Research Association and English Journal. At UO, where he is a candidate for a concurrent Ph.D. in Educational Leadership with a specialization in quantitative research methods and a Master’s of Public Administration, Thier teaches courses in research methods, public policy, equity and social justice, and professional writing. Most importantly, he is the proud father of two daughters.edit
- Dr. Charles Martinez, Jr., Dr. Michael Bullis, Dr. Kathleen Scalise, Dr. Julie Sykes, Dr. Yong Zhaoedit
OneWorld Now! (OWN) is an after-school program that focuses on global citizenship education by serving Seattle high school students with Arabic or Mandarin instruction, leadership coursework, and study abroad. A participatory program... more
OneWorld Now! (OWN) is an after-school program that focuses on global citizenship education by serving Seattle high school students with Arabic or Mandarin instruction, leadership coursework, and study abroad. A participatory program evaluation showed (a) OWN's leadership curriculum to align with most standards for promising and evidence-based practices, (b) a year of OWN's leadership coursework to associate with elevated levels of global citizenship on three measures , and (c) mixed results when comparing OWN's recruitment methods to a high school-specific definition for global citizenship development. We discuss OWN's status as a rare program to prioritize global citizenship and serve mostly economically disadvantaged students, plus opportunities for OWN to improve its design and theory.
In 2012, California Senate Bill 1458 added a measure of college and career preparedness to the Academic Performance Index (API). The Public Schools Accountability Act Advisory Committee was charged with making recommendations to the State... more
In 2012, California Senate Bill 1458 added a measure of college and career preparedness to the Academic Performance Index (API). The Public Schools Accountability Act Advisory Committee was charged with making recommendations to the State Superintendent of Public Instruction and the State Board of Education regarding measures that could serve as indicators of college and career preparedness at the high school level.
The Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) was commissioned to evaluate potential measures identified by the Committee. To do so, EPIC employed a criterion-based evaluation framework that focused on the technical quality, stakeholder
relevance, and system utility of each potential measure.
Five potential categories of measures were evaluated and reported in a series of white papers (and a sixth white paper examined multiple measures):
1. College admission exams
2. Advanced coursework
3. Innovative measures
4. Course-taking behavior
5. Career preparedness assessments
The EPIC evaluation leads to the recommendation that a measure of course-taking behavior would be the single best indicator that meets the evaluative criteria used and also has the greatest probability of leading to improvements in college and career
preparedness statewide.
The Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC) was commissioned to evaluate potential measures identified by the Committee. To do so, EPIC employed a criterion-based evaluation framework that focused on the technical quality, stakeholder
relevance, and system utility of each potential measure.
Five potential categories of measures were evaluated and reported in a series of white papers (and a sixth white paper examined multiple measures):
1. College admission exams
2. Advanced coursework
3. Innovative measures
4. Course-taking behavior
5. Career preparedness assessments
The EPIC evaluation leads to the recommendation that a measure of course-taking behavior would be the single best indicator that meets the evaluative criteria used and also has the greatest probability of leading to improvements in college and career
preparedness statewide.
Research Interests:
Responding to a groundswell of researcher and practitioner interest in developing students' interpersonal and in-trapersonal skills, we evaluated three measurement approaches for creativity and global citizenship. We designed a... more
Responding to a groundswell of researcher and practitioner interest in developing students' interpersonal and in-trapersonal skills, we evaluated three measurement approaches for creativity and global citizenship. We designed a 10-criteria evaluative framework from seminal and cutting-edge research to compare extant self-reports and situational-judgment tests (SJTs) from each construct and to design two discrete-choice experiments (DCEs). Our evaluation detailed opportunities, challenges, and tradeoffs presented by each approach's design considerations, possibilities for bias, and validity-related issues. We found that researchers rely heavily upon self-report instruments to measure constructs, such as creative thinking and global citizenship. We found evidence that the self-report instruments evaluated were susceptible to some biases more than others. We found that SJTs and DCEs may mitigate some concerns of bias and validity present in self-report when measuring inter-personal and intrapersonal skills. We make recommendations for future development of these formats.
Research Interests:
Many layers of education governance press upon U.S. schools, so we separated state actors into those internal to and those external to the system. In the process, we unpacked the traditional state–local dichotomy. Using interview data (n... more
Many layers of education governance press upon U.S. schools, so we separated state actors into those internal to and those external to the system. In the process, we unpacked the traditional state–local dichotomy. Using interview data (n = 45) from six case-study states, we analyzed local leaders', state-internal actors', and state-external players' perceptions of implementation flexibility and hindrances across several policy areas. We observed how interviewees' spheres of influence linked to which policy areas they viewed as salient or not, and their relative emphases on who and what within state education systems contributed to implementation flexibility and/or hindrances, and how these factors played out. We found important differences by sphere: the local sphere produced the most coherent findings, and state-internal was least coherent. We discuss implications for education governance research, applications for practitioners and policymakers, and a methodological contribution .