This event will be recorded.
The University of Pennsylvania Predoctoral Training Program in Interdisciplinary Research Methods for Field-based Research in Education, sponsored by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES), welcomes Dr. Rachel Baker to our weekly seminar series.
Measuring Task Complexity in College Major Requirements
Presented by Dr. Rachel Baker, Associate Professor, Penn GSE
Graduating from college requires understanding major curricular requirements and making several complex interdependent choices to fulfill them. In this paper, we create measures to describe and quantify complexity in major requirements. We then compare complexity across disciplines and universities. We find wide variation in our measures of complexity across and within department and campuses. To assess how well our measures of complexity match students’ experiences, we perform a laboratory experiment on student course-planning. Students in our experiment were 20 percentage points more likely to graduate with the least-complex set of requirements than the most-complex. Creating universal and broadly applicable measures of complexity gives policy makers and administrators better models for simplification, which could lead to meaningful and effective policy reforms.
More information
The IES Predoctoral Program’s weekly seminar series connects program fellows and affiliates to scholars and practitioners who engage in educational research and the development of research methods.
Seminars are likely of greatest interest to doctoral students and faculty but are open to all members of the Penn community. If you are interested in attending virtually, please email Melanie Bahti for Zoom information.