Eric Grodsky

I am Professor of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies and Co-Director of the Madison Education Partnership, a research-practice partnership between the Madison Metropolitan School District and UW-Madison. I have worked with and taught on quantitative models for observational data for the past 15 years, largely applying my skills to substantive work in education. The data sets on which I rely are typically drawn from panel studies based on stratified, clustered samples, have complex patterns of unit and item nonresponse and thus require analytic techniques to address a variety of violations of assumption on which simpler model are based (including correlated disturbances and heteroskedasticity).

In addition to pursuing my own research, I am on the training faculty for our Interdisciplinary Training Program in Education Sciences (ED 144-AAA7561) and our Center for Demography and Ecology training program (T32 HD07014) and provide methodological training and guidance to doctoral candidates in both programs. Much of the work I have done considers the stratified contexts under which families and schools contribute to the development of human capital. Students develop skill throughout their life course, beginning during early childhood, the focus of some of my current work, through primary, middle and high school, college and beyond. At each step of the way some are accelerated or ‘propped up’ by family advantage while others struggle to overcome obstacles that thwart their development. These skills include socioemotional and behavioral skills often measured via surveys or proxy reports from parents and teachers, cognitive skills related to academic achievement (captured by standardized test scores, including but not limited to state accountability systems and college entrance exams) and complementary skills between these two, such as the ability to perform tasks in a satisfactory way, produce quality written work and meet deadlines (often proxied in educational surveys by grades or other teacher evaluations).

See Eric Grodsky’s full profile on the Sociology website.