Multisite trials that randomize individuals (e.g., students) within sites (e.g., schools) or clusters (e.g., teachers/classrooms) within sites (e.g., schools) are commonly used for program evaluation because they provide opportunities to learn about treatment effects as well as their heterogeneity across sites and subgroups (defined by moderating…

Cheating in online exams without face-to-face proctoring has been a general concern for academic instructors during the crisis caused by COVID-19. The main goal of this work is to evaluate the cost of these dishonest practices by comparing the academic performance of webcam-proctored students and their unproctored peers in an online gradable test.…

Cluster randomized trials (CRTs) are commonly used to evaluate educational interventions, particularly their effectiveness. Recently there has been greater emphasis on using these trials to explore cost-effectiveness. However, methods for establishing the power of cluster randomized cost-effectiveness trials (CRCETs) are limited. This study…

Randomized A/B tests within online learning platforms enable us to draw unbiased causal estimators. However, precise estimates of treatment effects can be challenging due to minimal participation, resulting in underpowered A/B tests. Recent advancements indicate that leveraging auxiliary information from detailed logs and employing design-based…

Background: Researchers are often interested in testing the effectiveness of an intervention on multiple outcomes, for multiple subgroups, at multiple points in time, or across multiple treatment groups. The resulting multiplicity of statistical hypothesis tests can lead to spurious findings of effects. Multiple testing procedures (MTPs)…

Cost-effectiveness analysis is a widely used educational evaluation tool. The randomized controlled trials that aim to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the treatment are commonly referred to as randomized cost-effectiveness trials (RCETs). This study provides methods of power analysis for two-level multisite RCETs. Power computations take…

Network meta-analysis compares multiple treatments in terms of their efficacy and harm by including evidence from randomized controlled trials. Most clinical trials use parallel design, where patients are randomly allocated to different treatments and receive only 1 treatment. However, some trials use within person designs such as split-body,…

Background: Evidence from new health technologies is growing, along with demands for evidence to inform policy decisions, creating challenges in completing health technology assessments (HTAs)/systematic reviews (SRs) in a timely manner. Software can decrease the time and burden by automating the process, but evidence validating such software is…

Learner-centered coaching and feedback are relevant to various educational contexts. Spaced retrieval enhances long-term knowledge retention. We examined the efficacy of Blank Slate, a novel spaced retrieval software application, to promote learning and prevent forgetting, while gathering and analyzing data in the background about learners'…

Researchers often include covariates when they analyze the results of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), valuing the increased precision of the estimates over the potential of inducing small-sample bias when doing so. In this paper, we develop a sufficient condition which ensures that the inclusion of covariates does not cause small-sample bias…

The purpose of this paper is to present results of recent advances in power analyses to detect the moderator effects in Cluster Randomized Trials (CRTs). This paper focus on demonstration of the software PowerUp!-Moderator. This paper provides a resource for researchers seeking to design CRTs with adequate power to detect the moderator effects of…

Many randomized experiments in the social sciences allocate subjects to treatment arms at the time the subjects enroll. Desirable features of the mechanism used to assign subjects to treatment arms are often (1) equal numbers of subjects in intervention and control arms, (2) balanced allocation for population subgroups and across covariates, (3)…

An impediment to conducting high-quality quantitative research studies in education is the paucity of valid measures of learning gains. Studies often seek to investigate students' deep, conceptual understanding yet many measures assess only surface, procedural understanding. One reason is that the development of validated measures of conceptual…

The teaching and learning of programming are often considered a difficult topic for both teachers and students, due to its complexity and abstract nature. The traditional teaching approaches are unable to contribute substantially to the development of the necessary cognitive models by the students, producing high rates of failure and dropout in…

Background: Obesity has been identified as a global epidemic that is associated with numerous comorbidities such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cancer, cardiovascular disease. We have investigated the effects of Watsu® therapy and Immersion on HRV parameters of obese male subjects. Methods and Results: Volunteer 34 obese subjects with BMI above…