Treatment effect estimates from a "regression discontinuity design" (RDD) have high internal validity. However, the arguments that support the design apply to a subpopulation that is narrower and usually different from the population of substantive interest in evaluation research. The disconnect between RDD population and the…

Scholarship on the role of professional development opportunities for undergraduate students has highlighted the growing importance of internship programs. Different designs of internship programs have emerged as their numbers proliferate. Internship programs vary on key dimensions including integration of academic content, development of…

The purpose of this article is to describe a 40+ year journey during which researchers have endeavored to design and evaluate an integrated, empirically based reading intervention for secondary students and to chronicle the lessons learned as well as suggest future directions for this type of work. Initial development of the intervention began in…

Given the widespread use of non-experimental (NE) methods for assessing program impacts, there is a strong need to know whether NE approaches yield causally valid results in field settings. In within-study comparison (WSC) designs, the researcher compares treatment effects from an NE with those obtained from a randomized experiment that shares the…

More aggregate data on school performance is available than ever before, opening up new possibilities for applied researchers interested in assessing the effectiveness of school-level interventions quickly and at a relatively low cost by implementing comparative interrupted times series (CITS) designs. We examine the extent to which effect…

Short comparative interrupted times series (CITS) designs are increasingly being used in education research to assess the effectiveness of school-level interventions. These designs can be implemented relatively inexpensively, often drawing on publicly available data on aggregate school performance. However, the validity of this approach hinges on…

Background: Recent studies indicate that parent education programs that include content to enhance parents' mental states may prove efficacious in improving parenting behavior and child outcomes. Objective: This study presents findings from a national evaluation of the "Active Parenting First Five Years" (FFY) program. This group-based…

This article presents findings from a quasi-experimental evaluation of quality with a sample of 28 family child care providers in the All Our Kin Family Child Care Network, a staffed family child care network which offers a range of services including relationship-based intensive consultation, and 20 family child care providers who had no…

In experimental evaluations of health and social programs, the role of dosage is rarely explored because researchers cannot usually randomize individuals to experience varying dosage levels. Instead, such evaluations reveal the average effects of exposure to an intervention, although program exposure may vary widely. This article compares three…

It has often been lamented that girls are more likely not to attend or to drop-out (for example, because of gender preference by the parents, insecurity, pregnancy, amongst many other postulated factors) or that their achievement even if they stay in school is worse than boys. For the former, UNESCO introduced the Gender Parity Index (GPI), which…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate the implementation and impact of the IDEA Public Schools' Mathematics Curriculum Redesign (MCR) effort, funded by an Innovation and Research (EIR) grant. Methods: The study used a quasi-experimental matching design to examine the effect of MCR on student achievement outcomes. The study compared…

Instructional design (ID) is systematic way of suggesting a structure and giving meaning to an instructional problem by helping to visualize the problem and breaking into discrete and manageable units. In addition, ID is a systematic reflective process of applying instructional principles into plans by material, activity, resources and evaluation…

The current "K-12 Science Education framework" and "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) in the United States emphasise the integration of engineering design in science instruction to promote scientific literacy and engineering design skills among students. As such, many engineering education programmes have developed…

The present article considers a fundamental question in evaluation research: "By how much do program effects vary across sites?" The article first presents a theoretical model of cross-site impact variation and a related estimation model with a random treatment coefficient and fixed site-specific intercepts. This approach eliminates…

Researchers may be interested in examining the impact of programs that prepare youth and adults for successful careers but unable to implement experimental designs with true randomization of participants. As a result, these studies can be compromised by underlying factors that impact group selection and thus lead to potentially biased results.…