The Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY) has followed a national probability sample of 7th and 10th grade public school students for the last 25 years and is the largest and most comprehensive data set available to examine the factors that contribute to student and young adult interest in and understanding of science and technology. The LSAY is distinctive in its measurement of home, school, peer, and community variables over more than two decades, making it ideal for analyses that seek to understand the interaction between and among these factors.
The LSAY is a very large data set, including approximately 12,000 variables collected from more than 5,000 respondents over 25 years. Few secondary data analysts have worked with data sets that are this large and complex, but the LSAY data set holds the possibility of new analyses and policy guidance on many important subjects and issues in science and mathematics education, the development of STEMM careers, and the development and use of civic scientific literacy in American society. This proposed workshop will provide an introduction to the LSAY data set and a basic skill set that will allow workshop participants to begin to analyze these data productively. The proposed workshop will cover one week and will be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
The workshop will include 20 participants. Half of the participants will be selected from informal science education institutions and programs and the other half will be selected from predominately younger university faculty in education and the social sciences. All of the participants selected will be expected to have a basic working knowledge of SPSS or a comparable statistical package and they will receive a $2,000 stipend to cover travel, lodging, and related expenses associated with participating in the workshop. Priority will be given to workshop applicants who are currently funded by the NSF (EHR and SBE).
The proposed workshop will introduce the LSAY data set, suggest strategies for analyzing a large and complex data set, provide information about the major variables and scales included in the data set, and provide instruction in the construction of scales, indices, typologies, and other summary measures needed to analyze these data. Participants will be introduced to the logic and interpretation of item response theory (IRT) which has been used in the LSAY in the measurement of student achievement in science, mathematics, and reading. Participants will be instructed in the use of PRELIS and LISREL as tools that can read data sets produced by SPSS to perform confirmatory factor analyses and to construct scales. Each workshop participant will be expected to develop one or more analysis plans that will utilize the LSAY data to address an issue or question of interest and LSAY staff will interact with participants in regard to these analysis plans.
An evaluation of the workshop will be conducted to assess the short-term gain of participants and a follow-up assessment will be conducted one year later to measure longer-term utilization and/or publication.