Many experimental designs in educational and behavioral research involve at least one level of clustering. Clustering affects the precision of estimators and its impact on statistics in cross-sectional studies is well known. Clustering also occurs in longitudinal designs where students that are initially grouped may be regrouped in the following…

Descriptive analyses of socially important or theoretically interesting phenomena and trends are a vital component of research in the behavioral, social, economic, and health sciences. Such analyses yield reliable results when using representative individual participant data (IPD) from studies with complex survey designs, including educational…

The problem of assessing whether experimental results can be replicated is becoming increasingly important in many areas of science. It is often assumed that assessing replication is straightforward: All one needs to do is repeat the study and see whether the results of the original and replication studies agree. This article shows that the…

Background and purpose: Studies of education and learning that were described as experiments have been carried out in the USA by educational psychologists since about 1900. In this paper, we discuss the history of randomised trials in education in the USA in terms of five historical periods. In each period, the use of randomised trials was…

Background and purpose: Studies of education and learning that were described as experiments have been carried out in the USA by educational psychologists since about 1900. In this paper, we discuss the history of randomised trials in education in the USA in terms of five historical periods. In each period, the use of randomised trials was…

The precision of estimates of treatment effects in multilevel experiments depends on the sample sizes chosen at each level. It is often desirable to choose sample sizes at each level to obtain the smallest variance for a fixed total cost, that is, to obtain optimal sample allocation. This article extends previous results on optimal allocation to…

Researchers in the single-case design tradition have debated the size and importance of the observed autocorrelations in those designs. All of the past estimates of the autocorrelation in that literature have taken the observed autocorrelation estimates as the data to be used in the debate. However, estimates of the autocorrelation are subject to…

In single-case research, the multiple baseline design is a widely used approach for evaluating the effects of interventions on individuals. Multiple baseline designs involve repeated measurement of outcomes over time and the controlled introduction of a treatment at different times for different individuals. This article outlines a general…

Single case designs are a set of research methods for evaluating treatment effects by assigning different treatments to the same individual and measuring outcomes over time and are used across fields such as behavior analysis, clinical psychology, special education, and medicine. Emerging standards for single case designs have focused attention on…

Single-case designs are a class of research methods for evaluating treatment effects by measuring outcomes repeatedly over time while systematically introducing different condition (e.g., treatment and control) to the same individual. The designs are used across fields such as behavior analysis, clinical psychology, special education, and…

Research designs involving cluster randomization are becoming increasingly important in educational and behavioral research. Many of these designs involve two levels of clustering or nesting (students within classes and classes within schools). Researchers would like to compute effect size indexes based on the standardized mean difference to…

A common mistake in analysis of cluster randomized experiments is to ignore the effect of clustering and analyze the data as if each treatment group were a simple random sample. This typically leads to an overstatement of the precision of results and anticonservative conclusions about precision and statistical significance of treatment effects.…

Multisite research designs involving cluster randomization are becoming increasingly important in educational and behavioral research. Researchers would like to compute effect size indexes based on the standardized mean difference to compare the results of cluster-randomized studies (and corresponding quasi-experiments) with other studies and to…

Background/Context: Determining the effectiveness of reform strategies is a major part of the current and future educational research agenda. Effects of education reforms will be evaluated largely quantitatively, and an important aspect of this work will be judging how well reform strategies work. The rhetoric of contemporary school reform…

Glass's estimator of effect size, the sample mean difference divided by the sample standard deviation, is studied in the context of an explicit statistical model. The exact distribution of Glass's estimator is obtained and the estimator is shown to have a small sample bias. Alternatives are proposed and discussed. (Author/JKS)