Appendix: Methodology

Abstract

In order to measure the actual time spent on the New York State mandated ELA and math exam days for grades 3 through 8, a statewide survey of teachers and test proctors was conducted. This was a web administered survey, with email invitations. Sampling To construct a sampling frame of all the schools in the state, we began with the 2014-15 School Directory and General Information database. This is a database of 7242 schools, publicly available on the NYSED website. First we deleted any records that were non-public schools (1745), leaving 5497 records. Since this file contained both school-and district-level records, we then deleted all district-level records (719), leaving 4778 records. In order to limit the file to the targeted population of grades 3-8, we then deleted any records coded as Other (2), Pre-K only (9), Senior High Schools (888), and any records with missing data in the grade organization field (65). This left 3814 remaining records – representing our sample frame, the universe – coded as K-12 In order to identify teachers to survey, we developed a process for randomly selecting one teacher from each building in the sampling frame. Two fields were added and coded for each record in the file of 3814 school buildings: a name code A-Z and an order code F-L-M. Utilizing these codes, student research assistants visited each district/school website and added a teacher email to the database utilizing the following selection process for teacher emails: the name code alphabetically narrowed the selection to the list of teachers with a last name starting Records Total records in original SED file 7242 Less non-public schools-1745