Causal prescriptive statements are valued in the social sciences when there is the goal of helping people through interventions. The articles in this special issue cover different methods for testing causal prescriptive statements. This commentary identifies both virtues and liabilities of these different approaches. We argue that it is extremely…

In their commentary, D. W. Johnson, Johnson, and Roseth (2012) provided some laudatory statements about our article, but they also expressed a number of concerns. The concerns focus on the following issues: types and definitions of competition, our choice of control group, the nature of performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals, the…

In the No Child Left Behind Act and the What Works Clearinghouse, the federal government has attempted to establish guidelines for the type of education research that U.S. schools should consider in selecting instructional programs and resources. The government's clear preference for the medical model--a powerful research design in such fields as…

A solution to the problem of specification error due to excluded variables in statistical models of treatment effects in nonrandomized (nonequivalent) control group designs is presented. It involves longitudinal observation with at least two pretests. A maximum likelihood estimation program such as LISREL may provide reasonable estimates of…

Presents a prototypical case illustrating what positivist research means and argues that even critics of positivist research are logically committed to propositions that can be tested only through positivist research paradigms. The relationship between the nature of a community's research enterprise and its educational provisions must be causal.…