John Easton: Gender Gaps in High School Course Grades: Exploring a New Source of Information
The grades that students earn in their high school courses are highly consequential for them. Our own
research shows that students’ grades throughout the high school years are highly predictive of high
school graduation, college enrollment and college retention. Girls earn substantially higher grades in high
school than boys do, so these differences have large implications for future outcomes. I am seeking a
seed grant to prepare a large electronic administrative data set, called Gradebook, for use in an ongoing
research study of the gender gap in teacher-assigned grades. This project is based at the University of
Chicago Consortium on School Research and is being conducted in partnership with Chicago Public
Schools (CPS). Using other CPS data from our extensive archive, a small team of colleagues and I have
begun to explore some of our research questions, but we need much more detailed data about classroom
behaviors to unpack the sources of the gender gap. Gradebook provides very specific information about
students’ classroom activities and their responses to instructional prompts. These data have never been
used in research before. Their sole use up until now has been administrative — for tracking and recording
all teacher marks of their students’ school work, replacing traditional paper copy grade books. Given
previous experience in using administrative data sources for research purposes, we are aware of the
intensive requirements of cleaning and organizing new data sets and are therefore requesting resources
to assist in this process and facilitate successful completion of the ongoing research.
