Canada does not have a national system wide assessment of the socioeconomic impacts of academic research. We do not have a Research Excellence Framework such as in the United Kingdom. Yet Canadian researchers, funders and institutions are interested in research impact, particularly the methods and processes for generating impacts to complement…

Regression discontinuity (RD) designs have gained significant popularity as a quasi-experimental device for evaluating education programs and policies. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of RD designs, focusing on the continuity-based framework, the most widely adopted RD framework. We first review the fundamental aspects of RD…

Physical activity (PA) promotion is an ideal intervention target for public health because it has the potential to help individuals feel better, sleep better, and perform daily tasks more easily, in addition to providing disease prevention benefits. There is strong evidence that individual-level theory-based behavioral interventions are effective…

Purpose: The dual goals of this tutorial are (a) to increase awareness and use of mediation and moderation models in cognitive-communication rehabilitation research by describing options, benefits, and attainable analytic approaches for researchers with limited resources and sample sizes and (b) to describe how these findings may be interpreted…

Over the last twenty years, education researchers have increasingly conducted randomised experiments with the goal of informing the decisions of educators and policymakers. Such experiments have generally employed broad, consequential, standardised outcome measures in the hope that this would allow decisionmakers to compare effectiveness of…

The use of singular methodologies has dominated emotional and behavioral disorder (EBD) intervention research, and by extension, the field has not deployed mixed-methods research (MMR). The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of MMR and demonstrate its utility for conducting EBD intervention research. The basic tenants and design…

The benefits of understanding variation apply on multiple levels. Local policymakers and practitioners need to know both the average impact of an intervention and its variation across settings to properly assess its likely benefits and risks for their jurisdictions. For social scientists, cross-site impact variation offers opportunities to learn…

This project seeks to answer questions about the effectiveness of early childhood programs in meeting their important goals, paying careful attention to the effectiveness of program variations (especially in regard to particular demographic and economic target groups). This review will be guided by two overarching questions: (1) How effective are…

The major aim of this manuscript is to bring together two important topics that have recently received much attention in child and adolescent research, albeit separately from each other: single-case experimental designs and statistical mediation analysis. Single-case experimental designs (SCEDs) are increasingly recognized as a valuable…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) examines manuscripts (that is, journal articles, working papers, dissertations, or other publications or pieces of written research presented as complete sets of findings) to determine if they are eligible to be included in a specific review effort. The WWC first determines whether the manuscript contains a…

This article addresses the gap between what works in research and what works in practice. Currently, research in evidence-based education policy and practice focuses on randomized controlled trials. These can support causal ascriptions ("It worked") but provide little basis for local effectiveness predictions ("It will work…

Data from cluster randomized trials do not always have a pure hierarchical structure. For instance, students are nested within schools that may be crossed by neighborhoods, and soldiers are nested within army units that may be crossed by mental health-care professionals. It is important that the random cross-classification is taken into account…

Many studies of education interventions make claims about impacts on students' outcomes. Some studies have designs that enable readers to make causal inferences about the effects of an intervention but others have designs that do not permit these types of conclusions. To help policymakers, practitioners, and others make sense of study results, the…

There is growing pressure to make efficacy experiments more useful. This requires attending to the twin goals of generalizing experimental results to those schools that will use the results and testing the intervention's theory of action. We show how electronic records, created naturally during the daily operation of technology-based…

With today's technology, Extension professionals have a variety of tools available for program evaluation. This article describes an innovative platform called VoiceThread that has been used in many classrooms but also is useful for conducting virtual focus group research. I explain how this tool can be used to collect qualitative participant…