Ken Frank MSU website

517-285-1587


My Position

   I am professor in Measurement and Quantitative Methods (click here to apply to the program) within Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special  Education within the College of Education and also in Fisheries and Wildlife within the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Michigan State University.

      As of 2015 I am MSU Foundation Professor of Sociometrics (referring to the quantitative study of social context).

   I am affiliated with the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, the Education Policy Center and the Center for Statistical Training and Consulting (CSTAT).

Bio: Kenneth Frank received his Ph.D. in measurement, evaluation and statistical analysis from the School of Education at the University of Chicago in 1993.  He is MSU Foundation professor of Sociometrics, professor in Counseling, Educational Psychology and Special Education; and adjunct (by courtesy) in Fisheries and Wildlife and Sociology at Michigan State University.  His substantive interests include the study of schools as organizations, social structures of students and teachers and school decision-making, and social capital.  His substantive areas are linked to several methodological interests: social network analysis, sensitivity analysis and causal inference (http://konfound-it.com with applications to COVID-19 https://www.konfound-it.org/), and multi-level models. His publications include quantitative methods for representing relations among actors in a social network, robustness indices for sensitivity analysis for causal inferences, and the effects of social capital in schools, natural resource management, and other social contexts.  Dr. Frank’s current projects include how beginning teachers’ networks affect their response to the Common Core; how schools respond to increases in core curricular requirements; school governance; teachers’ use of social media https://www.teachersinsocialmedia.com/); implementation of the Carbon-Time science curriculum (http://carbontime.bscs.org/); epistemic network analysis (http://www.epistemicnetwork.org/); social network intervention in natural resources and construction management; complex decision-making in health care; the diffusion of knowledge about climate change.

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Educational Background

1988 - 1993 University of Chicago Department of Education, program in Measurement, Evaluation, and Statistical Analysis, Ph.D.

My dissertation concerned the use of an iterative partitioning clustering algorithm to identify cliques of actors in a network. Applications include identifying cliques of teachers in high schools, cliques of students in a single grade of high school, and subgroups of schools which exchange many students.

     Chair: Anthony Bryk

     Committee: Charles Bidwell, Benjamin Wright, Kazuo Yamaguchi, Dan Lortie and Bob Dreeben

1986-1988 University of Michigan School of Education, program in Higher and Adult Continuing Education,. Masters of Arts.

1981-1985 University of Michigan. Major in Statistics and English, Bachelor of Arts.

Full Vitae

For breakdown by research strand see: https://sites.google.com/msu.edu/kenfrank/research