Until now, the conventional approach using two distinct groups, experimental and control, continues to dominate research, especially education research. Researchers, particularly those who are active in this domain, readily recognise this pattern when surveying literature. This article explores the use of the Solomon four-group design as a…

Experimental designs in the social sciences have received increasing attention due to their power to produce causal inferences. Nevertheless, experimental research faces limitations, including limited external validity and unrealistic treatments. We propose combining qualitative fieldwork and experimental design iteratively--moving back-and-forth…

This Workshop on Survey Methods in Education Research tool consists of a facilitator guide and workshop handouts. The toolkit is intended for use by state or district education leaders and others who want to conduct training on developing and administering surveys. The facilitator guide provides materials related to various phases of the survey…

The aim of this case study is to highlight the importance of piloting or pre-testing the research design (in this case, semi-structured interviews and narratives). Most textbooks offer minimal guidance about pre-testing the research design, and published reports rarely report whether the research was piloted and, if so, what were the results.…

This study was designed to assess the impact of a decision-making curriculum (PEER-DM) on the social peer relationship knowledge and self-protective decision-making skills of adolescents with disabilities in hypothetical situations involving negative peer pressure. A randomized design was used to assign students with disabilities from…

The association made between the meaning, spelling, and pronunciation of a word has been shown to help children remember the meanings of words. The present study addressed whether the presence of a target word in Braille during instruction facilitated vocabulary learning more efficiently than an auditory-only instructional condition. The authors…

In 2003, Chicago launched "Double-Dose Algebra," requiring students with pretest scores below the national median to take two periods of math--algebra and supplemental coursework. In many schools, assignment to Double Dose changed the peer composition of the algebra classroom. Using school-specific instrumental variables within a…

Pretest-posttest experimental designs are often used in randomized control trials (RCTs) in the education field to improve the precision of the estimated treatment effects. For logistic reasons, however, pretest data are often collected after random assignment, so that including them in the analysis could bias the posttest impact estimates. Thus,…