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…

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…

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…

General education classrooms provide a common milieu for understanding and appropriating results of classroom research projects, which are typically viewed as having little application outside their original contexts. Here, results of an investigation into the "sophomore slump," where grades and class attendance rates typically suffer, are…

The goal of this article is to frame some new directions to social comparison research in organizational settings. Four themes are developed. First, we examine the role of organizational variables in shaping the basic sub processes in social comparison, such as the selection of referents. The second theme focuses on the meaning of level of…

This paper reports a procedure designed to enable a school district to measure the adequacy of its educational facilities. Reasonable adherence to the guidelines described regarding scale development and implementation should provide a useful comparative tool with broad applicability. The report includes a general description of the procedure…

Discusses research related to identifying early predictors of school success or intelligence. Reports on a study that suggested correlations exist between how babies process information (visual attentiveness) in the first six months of life and the child's performance on intelligence tests in school. (ML)

This paper discusses the principles underlying discriminant analysis and constructs a simulated data set to illustrate its methods. Discriminant analysis is a multivariate technique for identifying the best combination of variables to maximally discriminate between groups. Discriminant functions are established on existing groups and used to…

Provides an abridgement of one section of the National Commission for Environmental Education's second report that focuses on predictors and correlates of environmental action. Summarizes research findings on variables that are associated with responsible environmental behavior. Also presents the major conclusions derived from the investigated…

When studying different types of returns to education, educational reforms are commonly used in the economics literature as a source of exogenous variation in education. The Swedish compulsory school reform is one example; the reform extended compulsory education throughout the country, in different municipalities at different points in time. Such…

This analysis of the evaluation literature on interactive video describes nature of the evaluations, reviews information on the effectiveness of interactive video, and discusses what the evaluations offer for improvement of interactive video design and use. Implications of these evaluations for the conduct of future studies are noted. (MBR)

Florida's Meritorious School Act provides monetary rewards for meritorious schools in each of the state's 67 districts when the schools are identified using approved procedures. The law calls for each district to develop its own plan for selecting winning schools. Each school must be selected in part by being in the upper quartile of district…

This report describes plans for the development of a major longitudinal research database designed to support the development and validation of new predictors of Army performance, and also new measures of Army performance against which the new predictors can be validated. The following aspects of the database are addressed: (1) the anticipated…

This document reports on the design and development of a comprehensive longitudinal monitoring system that allows for the identification of at-risk students and the evaluation of district programs and services by one high school and five elementary school districts in California and the School of Education at San Jose State University. The goal of…