Libby Pier

Libby_Pier
Libby Pier
Director of Impact,
Education Analytics

Libby Pier is research manager at Education Analytics, a nonprofit organization based in Madison, Wisconsin, that conducts sophisticated statistical research to solve complex, pressing problems facing public education in the U.S. Pier received her PhD in learning sciences from the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

updated 2021

Contributing topics
Educational governance & policy
Educator workforce & effectiveness
Supporting students’ social-emotional, mental & physical health
Understanding, measuring & improving student outcomes
Contributing initiatives
CORE-PACE Research Partnership
COVID-19 Recovery
Commentary by Libby Pier
: COVID-19 and the Educational Equity Crisis
Libby Pier in the Media
: Kids Lost More Than Learning When COVID Closed Their Schools
: Who's Hit Hardest by the 'Learning Lag' from Pandemic Online Education
: Back-To-School: Virtual Education Has Left Many Students with Gaps in Their Learning. How Can Schools Meet Them Where They Are?
: What Kids Lost When COVID-19 Upended School
: The Road to Recovery: What Last Year’s Data Can Tell Us About Next Year’s Plans
Publications by Libby Pier
An IRT Mixture Model for Rating Scale Confusion Associated with Negatively Worded Items in Measures of Social-Emotional Learning
This paper illustrates the application of mixture IRT models to evaluate the possibility of respondent confusion due to the negative wording of certain items on a social-emotional learning (SEL) assessment. Using actual student self-report ratings…
Can We Measure Classroom Supports for Social-Emotional Learning?
This brief applies value-added models to student surveys in the CORE Districts to explore whether social-emotional learning (SEL) surveys can be used to measure effective classroom-level supports for SEL. The authors find that classrooms differ in…
Measuring School Contributions to Growth in Social-Emotional Learning
School value-added models are increasingly used to measure schools’ contributions to student success. At the same time, policymakers and researchers agree that schools should support students’ social-emotional learning (SEL) as well as academic…
Trends in Student Social-Emotional Learning
Evidence from the CORE Districts
Mounting evidence demonstrates that social-emotional skills are important for students’ academic and life success, yet there is limited evidence on how these skills develop over time and how this development varies across student subgroups. This…