Jing Liu

Liu_Jing.jpg

2203 Benjamin Building

College Park, MD 20742

Welcome to my website! I am currently Assistant Professor in Education Policy at the University of Maryland College Park. I am also a research affiliate to the IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Named as a National Academy of Education Sciences/Spencer Dissertation Fellow, I earned my Ph.D. in Economics of Education from Stanford University in 2018. Before I joined UMD, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute.

My research uses rigorous quantitative evidence to evaluate and inform education policies at the national, state, and local levels, with the goal of improving learning opportunities for historically marginalized students in urban areas. My work broadly engages with critical policy issues including student absenteeism, exclusionary discipline, educator’s labor market, school reform, and higher education. Grounded in economic theory and policy analysis, I use both quasi-experimental designs and data science methods such as computational linguistic analysis to analyze large administrative data and unstructured information. Most of my current projects focus on understanding the development of student engagement, behavior, and social emotional skills, how these skills and dispositions contribute to student success in the short and long run, and what the implications are for improving equal educational opportunities. My work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Education Finance and Policy, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.

News

Aug 12, 2023 Dora Demszky and I published our paper “M-Powering Teachers: Natural Language Processing Powered Feedback Improves 1: 1 Instruction and Student Outcomes” in the Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale.
Jun 16, 2023 Education Week published a news article about our paper “Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities”
Jun 15, 2023 AERA Communications shared the main findings from our paper “Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities”. Watch this video to hear my discussion on this paper.
Jun 14, 2023 Our paper “Troublemakers? The Role of Frequent Teacher Referrers in Expanding Racial Disciplinary Disproportionalities” is published in Educational Researcher.
May 22, 2023 I gave a talk on Harnessing the Power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to Support Teachers at Terrapin EdTalks.