Background: For randomized trials that use text as an outcome, traditional approaches for assessing treatment impact require each document first be manually coded for constructs of interest by trained human raters. These hand-coded scores are then used as a measured outcome for an impact analysis, with the average scores of the treatment group…

Background: Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) give unbiased estimates of average effects. However, positive effects for the majority of students may mask harmful effects for smaller subgroups, and RCTs often have too small a sample to estimate these subgroup effects. In many RCTs, covariate and outcome data are drawn from a larger database. For…

Bayesian statistical methods have become more feasible to implement with advances in computing but are not commonly used in educational research. In contrast to frequentist approaches that take hypotheses (and the associated parameters) as fixed, Bayesian methods take data as fixed and hypotheses as random. This difference means that Bayesian…