Background: Regression Discontinuous Design (RDD) is widely used in educational studies. Through RDD, researchers can obtain unbiased results when Randomized Experimental Design (RED) is inaccessible. Compared to RED, the RDD only requires a cut score variable (continuous) and a cutoff value to assign students to the treatment or control groups.…

Background: Early-grade reading proficiency is well documented as in important factor for later academic success. Researchers and educators consider the achievement of reading proficiency by the end of grade three to be crucial to future academic success and financial independence (Hein et al., 2013; La Paro & Pianta, 2000; Singh, 2013). As…

Background/Context: The landscape of college remediation programs experienced significant shifts from prerequisite models to corequisite models in the past few years across the nation. The traditional prerequisite models required students placed below college level to pass a sequence of remedial courses before they could enroll in college-level…

Background/Context: Pass/fail standardized exams frequently selectively rescore failing exams and retest failing examinees. This practice distorts the test score distribution and can confuse those who do analysis on these distributions. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal showed large discontinuities in the New York City Regent test score…

Experimental and quasi-experimental designs play a central role in estimating cause-effect relationships in education, psychology, and many other fields of the social and behavioral sciences. This paper presents and discusses the causal graphs of experimental and quasi-experimental designs. For quasi-experimental designs the authors demonstrate…

Background/Context: Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are used for policy and program evaluation where subjects' eligibility into a program or policy is determined by whether an assignment variable (i.e., running variable) exceeds a pre-defined cutoff. Under a standard RD design with a continuous assignment variable, the average treatment…

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a tiered instructional delivery framework developed to meet the needs of all students and has the potential to improve reading achievement, prevent reading problems, and improve identification accuracy for learning disabilities. Tier 1 typically occurs in the context of the general education classroom and is…

This study aims to determine whether educational accountability promotes educational triage. This study exploits a natural experiment in North Carolina in which standards increased first in math in 2006 and second in reading in 2008 to determine whether an increase in educational standards caused an increase in educational triage at the expense of…

Regression discontinuity designs (RDDs) are considered to be one of the strongest nonexperimental designs available for the purpose of identifying the effects of an intervention. RDD can be used in situations in which assignment to a treatment group is based on a cutoff value on a continuous assignment variable. The impact of the intervention is…