Dr. Schiller conducts research on adolescent development and academic achievement and is a major figure in the life-course group at CSDA. In collaboration with Chandra Muller at UT-Austin, she is heavily involved in analyzing school achievement for the Add Health project as well as in gathering supplemental school data for it. Many of her published articles investigate how the high-stakes testing implemented as a result of the No Child Left Behind Act leads to differential outcomes for students according to race/ethnicity and social class.
Schiller’s work has examined the impacts of school curricula and course content on students’ opportunities, especially for adolescents from non-mainstream backgrounds. Her article with Chandra Muller in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis reveals that even though, on the state level, stricter graduation requirements and linkages of test performance to consequences for schools produce larger numbers of students in higher-level mathematics courses, academic differentials based on student socioeconomic status also tend to increase. Racial and ethnic differences are smaller in states where there were consequences for students as a result of test performance. Another paper, “Identifying Social Contexts in Affiliation Networks: Preserving the Duality of People and Events,” published in Social Networks uses network-analysis techniques to generate finely grained measures of school tracking based on courses that students take, thus moving the study of school organization and its effects beyond the simplistic analysis of students in a few discrete tracks. In a forthcoming paper in Sociology of Education, she examines how the linkage between family structure and adolescents’ academic experiences is part of a larger, dynamic process unfolding over time. Focusing on mathematics courses, which are highly structured and sequential, these analyses show how family instability increases the likelihood that young people will either drop out of high school or graduate without completing course requirements that are needed to attend a four-year college.
A large part of Dr. Schiller’s work in recent years has been devoted to the collection of the high school transcript data and related curriculum indicators from textbooks for the Add Health dataset. The first public-use data from this project was released in 2005. The release of additional measures relating to courses in other subjects and fine-grained indicators of curriculum is pending approval from Add Health. Provision of detailed academic records of students greatly enhances the value of the Add Health data as school is such an important, if not the most important, component of adolescent life.
During the past three years Schiller has been an investigator on two NSF grants to study gender differences in math and science achievement and the relationship between science achievement and health behavior. In addition, she is an investigator on an NICHD grant that produced a new education component for the Add Health data based on students’ high school transcripts and schools’ textbook lists.
In addition to continuing her work on the effects of the social organization of schools on student achievement, Dr. Schiller is involved in a new project to collect high school yearbooks for the schools Add Health students attend. The yearbooks will be coded to create complex and nuanced pictures of the social organization of schools, from both academic and extracurricular perspectives, thus providing a new way of conceptualizing schools as complex organizations, as well as a new method of data collection on that organization. An NICHD grant for this project is pending.
She will work with French sociologist of education, Yaël Brinbaum, who will be in residence at CSDA during 2007.
Schiller has been instrumental in helping CSDA to establish a “cold room” for the analysis of confidential datasets and in renewing CSDA’s contract for sensitive data from Add Health. She currently has office space in CSDA for herself and a graduate assistant, and her frequent presence contributes to the overall research environment at the center. She serves as a resource for other associates, such as Kecia Johnson and Scott South, who are using the Add Health data.
Schiller has made extensive use of the computing infrastructure, as well as of data and grant administration services. She relies on the CSDA cold room for much of her data work.