Libby Pier

Libby_Pier
Libby Pier
Director of Impact,
Education Analytics

Libby Pier is director of impact at Education Analytics, a Madison-based educational research and data science nonprofit. She oversees project, knowledge, and people management for the research team, including internal research initiatives and external research projects that inform the statistics and metrics Education Analytics designs, computes, and reports in dynamic, user-centered platforms. She formerly taught 8th, 9th, and 10th grade English in Los Angeles through Teach For America. Pier earned her MA in urban education from Loyola Marymount Universit and a PhD in learning sciences with a focus on quantitative methods from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

updated 2025

Contributing topics
Educational governance & policy
Educator workforce & effectiveness
Supporting students’ social-emotional, mental & physical health
Understanding, measuring & improving student outcomes
Contributing initiatives
CORE-PACE Research Partnership
COVID-19 Recovery
Commentary by Libby Pier
: COVID-19 and the Educational Equity Crisis: Evidence on Learning Loss From the CORE Data Collaborative
Libby Pier in the Media
: Kids Lost More Than Learning When COVID Closed Their Schools
: Who's Hit Hardest by the 'Learning Lag' from Pandemic Online Education
: Back-To-School: Virtual Education Has Left Many Students with Gaps in Their Learning. How Can Schools Meet Them Where They Are?
: What Kids Lost When COVID-19 Upended School
: The Road to Recovery: What Last Year’s Data Can Tell Us About Next Year’s Plans
Publications by Libby Pier
An IRT Mixture Model for Rating Scale Confusion Associated with Negatively Worded Items in Measures of Social-Emotional Learning
This paper uses mixture IRT models to evaluate whether students experience confusion due to negative wording of items on a social-emotional learning assessment. It examines the consequences of confusion on student- and school-level scores and…
Can We Measure Classroom Supports for Social-Emotional Learning?
This study uses value-added models to explore whether social-emotional learning (SEL) surveys can measure effective classroom-level supports for SEL. Results show that classrooms differ in their effect on students' growth in self-reported SEL,…
Measuring School Contributions to Growth in Social-Emotional Learning
This report examines the stability of school effects on social-emotional learning (SEL) over two years in California's CORE districts. The correlations among school effects in the same grades across different years are positive but lower than those…
Trends in Student Social-Emotional Learning
Evidence from the CORE Districts
This study examines how social-emotional skills develop from Grade 4 to Grade 12 and vary by gender, socioeconomic status, and race/ethnicity. Based on self-report student surveys administered to around 400,000 students in California, the study…