Research Interests
Rebeca A. Cooper, Ed.D.
Assistant Professor
Dr. Cooper's research examines educational measurement and its consequences for the decisions school leaders make. She studies whether the assessments districts depend on actually measure what leaders believe they measure, and what follows for students when they do not.
Her work centers on three areas. The first is assessment quality: the reliability and validity of locally developed tests, item difficulty and discrimination, and the alignment between how a test is built and how its results are used. The second is growth measurement, including standardized scoring, longitudinal analysis of student performance, and the calculation of student and teacher growth for purposes such as the Teacher Incentive Allotment. The third is the effect of statewide assessment change, including longitudinal analysis of the STAAR redesign and its consequences for student performance and accountability ratings.
Running through all three is a question about equity: whether measured growth is distributed fairly across student groups. This has led to work examining outcomes for students with disabilities, students receiving tiered intervention, economically disadvantaged students, and students in rural and small districts.
Dr. Cooper also works in improvement science and action research, partnering with campus and district teams to sharpen loosely defined problems of practice into questions that can be tested and answered with evidence.
A translational commitment shapes how she approaches this work. Psychometric methods confined to technical manuals cannot improve practice, so much of her scholarship reframes concepts such as standardized scoring and reliability estimation into forms practitioners can apply to their own data.
She extends the same commitment to doctoral education, where her scholarship on research methods pedagogy treats statistical reasoning as a language students can learn rather than an obstacle they must survive.
Her work centers on three areas. The first is assessment quality: the reliability and validity of locally developed tests, item difficulty and discrimination, and the alignment between how a test is built and how its results are used. The second is growth measurement, including standardized scoring, longitudinal analysis of student performance, and the calculation of student and teacher growth for purposes such as the Teacher Incentive Allotment. The third is the effect of statewide assessment change, including longitudinal analysis of the STAAR redesign and its consequences for student performance and accountability ratings.
Running through all three is a question about equity: whether measured growth is distributed fairly across student groups. This has led to work examining outcomes for students with disabilities, students receiving tiered intervention, economically disadvantaged students, and students in rural and small districts.
Dr. Cooper also works in improvement science and action research, partnering with campus and district teams to sharpen loosely defined problems of practice into questions that can be tested and answered with evidence.
A translational commitment shapes how she approaches this work. Psychometric methods confined to technical manuals cannot improve practice, so much of her scholarship reframes concepts such as standardized scoring and reliability estimation into forms practitioners can apply to their own data.
She extends the same commitment to doctoral education, where her scholarship on research methods pedagogy treats statistical reasoning as a language students can learn rather than an obstacle they must survive.