Larry Hedges is a Senior Fellow at NORC and Co-Principal Investigator for the Center for Advancing Research and Communication in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. He is also Board of Trustees Professor of Statistics and Professor of Educational and Social Policy at Northwestern University. He was formerly the Stella M. Rowley Distinguished Service Professor of Education, Psychology, and Sociology at the University of Chicago.
Hedges's research interests include the development of statistical methods for social research, the use of statistical concepts in social and cognitive theory, the demography of talent and academic achievement, and educational policy analysis. Major areas of his methodological work include the development of statistical methods for combining evidence from multiple empirical research studies (meta-analysis) and the design and interpretation of social experiments. His work in psychology has focused on the development of statistical models for cognitive processes involved in estimation, categorization, and discrimination. His sociological work has largely concerned the social distribution of cognitive test scores, their changes over time and their relation to schooling and other social processes. His work on educational policy concerns the relation of school resources to educational outcomes such as academic achievement and the development of evidence-based social policy.
Hedges is a member of the National Academy of Education, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Educational Research Association, the American Statistical Association, and the American Psychological Association. He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, was Editor of the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, was Quantitative Methods Editor of Psychological Bulletin, and served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology, the Review of Educational Research, and Psychological Bulletin. He has served on numerous professional boards and panels including several National Research Council committees. He is also (currently) on the technical advisory committees of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) and (formerly) the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Developments Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). His books include Statistical Methods for Meta-analysis (with Ingram Olkin) and The Handbook of Research Synthesis (with Harris Cooper) and The Social Organization of Schooling (with Barbara Schneider).