Biography
Wendy Chan is an associate professor of education in the Human Development and Quantitative Methods Division at Penn GSE. Dr. Chan’s research focuses on applied statistical methods to improve generalizations from small studies in education. As an expert on educational statistics, Dr. Chan has conducted rigorous research into the limitations of small sample sizes on the external validity of a study. These limitations present real policy implications as it calls into question the relevance of a study's findings.
Dr. Chan received her Ph.D. in statistics from Northwestern University. She began her career in education as a member of Teach for America, where she taught sixth- and eighth-grade mathematics in a large middle school in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, Psychological Methods, and Evaluation Review.
Research Interests and Current Projects
Dr. Chan specializes in applied educational statistics, and her research projects and interests are at the leading edge of work on statistics methods in field contexts, including scaling up interventions. Her current projects assess the extent to which generalizations can be made from small studies and they consider the advantages and tradeoffs of different estimation approaches in the presence of limited data. In another project, Dr. Chan considers the impact of violations in model assumptions on the validity of estimates in generalization studies. In this work, she assesses the effectiveness of robust estimation approaches in improving the precision and bias of estimates when core model assumptions are violated. In addition to her work in generalization, Dr. Chan has also worked on research in experimental design and examined corrections to test statistics in the presence of clustering and treatment effect heterogeneity.
Publications
Journal Editorial Boards
Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics
Editorial Board