This article reviews the origins and use of the terms quasi-experiment and natural experiment. It demonstrates how the terms conflate whether variation in the independent variable of interest falls short of random with whether researchers find, rather than intervene to create, that variation. Using the lens of assignment--the process driving…

Sample size and statistical power are important factors to consider when planning a research synthesis. Power analysis methods have been developed for fixed effect or random effects models, but until recently these methods were limited to simple data structures with a single, independent effect per study. Recent work has provided power…

Because studies examining youth drug use often have data with a high proportion of zeros, they often do not meet the assumptions for univariate or linear regression analyses that are typically used. We demonstrate the use of zero-inflated negative binomial regression models to address excessive zeros in drug use frequency on perceptions of…

Given the continuing poor post-school outcomes for students with ASD, combined with the limited number of current interventions to address the problem, the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services'(OSERS) charged the National Technical Assistance Center on Transition (NTACT) with identifying and…

Over the past decade, but especially in the past few years, programs with a "promise" label have been advanced at the local, state, and federal levels. To advance understanding of the design, implementation, and impact of the many different versions of emerging programs, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers need an organizing…

Discipline-based education researchers have a natural laboratory--classrooms, programs, colleges, and universities. Studies that administer treatments to multiple sections, in multiple years, or at multiple institutions are particularly compelling for two reasons: first, the sample sizes increase, and second, the implementation of the treatments…

The purpose of this article is to clarify the discrepancy in the use of "queer" as a sexual identity classification in education survey research. This study extends the work completed by Dugan and Yurman (2011), who empirically demonstrated problems with treating LGB students as a homogenous population through collapsing all respondents…

Several methods for testing mediation hypotheses with 2-level nested data have been proposed by researchers using a multilevel modeling (MLM) paradigm. However, these MLM approaches do not accommodate mediation pathways with Level-2 outcomes and may produce conflated estimates of between- and within-level components of indirect effects. Moreover,…

Although definitions of validity have evolved considerably since L. J. Cronbach and P. E. Meehl's classic (1955) review, contemporary validity research continues to emphasize correlational analyses assessing predictor-criterion relationships, with most outcome criteria being self-reports. The present article describes an alternative way of…

The Department of Health in England released a new health research strategy in 2006 with far-reaching implications for both health research and research management. The explicit policy shift is towards centres of excellence and away from historical block allocations of funding to National Health Service (NHS) healthcare organisations--with these…

This study examined the roles of 3 multilevel motivational predictors in proteges' personal learning in teams: an autonomy-supportive team climate, mentors' autonomy support, and proteges' autonomy orientation. The authors followed 305 proteges in 58 teams for 12 weeks and found that all 3 predictors were positively related to the proteges'…

Latent class analysis (LCA) is a statistical method used to identify subtypes of related cases using a set of categorical or continuous observed variables. Traditional LCA assumes that observations are independent. However, multilevel data structures are common in social and behavioral research and alternative strategies are needed. In this…

Since Topping published his literature review on peer assessment in 1998, the number of studies on this subject has doubled, if not tripled. However, along with this expansion, the diversity of peer assessment applications increased equally fast. Based on recent literature, this contribution focuses specifically on the diversity that has come to…

Although interest in study abroad has grown consistently in recent decades, study abroad professionals and higher education scholars have been unable to explain or rectify the long-standing gender gap in study abroad participation. This study applies an integrated model of the student-choice construct to explore differences between male and female…

Objective: The National Institute of Mental Health funds institutional National Research Service Awards (NRSA) to provide postdoctoral research training. While peer-reviewed publications are the most common outcome measure utilized, there has been little discussion of how publications should be counted or what factors impact the long-term…