A new design-based theory has recently been developed to estimate impacts for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and basic quasi-experimental designs (QEDs) for a wide range of designs used in social policy research (Imbens & Rubin, 2015; Schochet, 2016). These methods use the potential outcomes framework and known features of study designs…

Head Start is a national program that helps young children from families with low income get ready to succeed in school. It does this by working to promote their early learning and health and their families' well-being. The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) provides national information about Head Start programs and…

The purpose of this paper is to showcase new research that seeks to provide guidance on the heterogeneity of treatment effects by utilizing the variance of demographic differences in state assessments. This study is focused on a simple randomized block design where students are nested within schools, and within each school students are randomized…

Evaluators of education interventions are increasingly designing studies to detect impacts much smaller than the 0.20 standard deviations that Cohen (1988) characterized as "small." While the need to detect smaller impacts is based on compelling arguments that such impacts are substantively meaningful, the drive to detect smaller impacts…

This NCEE Technical Methods Paper compares the estimated impacts of an educational intervention using experimental and regression discontinuity (RD) study designs. The analysis used data from two large-scale randomized controlled trials--the Education Technology Evaluation and the Teach for America Study--to provide evidence on the performance of…

To support the review of the National Curriculum, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) was commissioned by the Department for Education in the spring of 2011 to produce a report detailing curricular arrangements in a number of high-performing educational jurisdictions. The principal source of information for this report has been…

Performance theorist Herbert Blau's "The Audience" (Baltimore and London, Johns Hopkins Press, 1990) is an important yet neglected theoretical text on theatre audience. Deconstructive, dense and allusive in nature, Blau's text creates a real challenge for his reader. This paper presents a study of "The Audience" employing what I am calling…

The causes of rural/urban educational inequalities are multiple and diverse, and their analysis requires multi-disciplinary, longitudinal research. In this Polish study, preliminary examination of macrostatistical data on rural/urban disparities revealed the limitations of dichotomous analysis. In a broad, in-depth approach designed to develop a…

Explores different measures of performance in a complex management game and suggests how these measures can be used to motivate learning and evaluate performance. (Author)

This book is designed to provide knowledge about educational research and to help graduate students in education organize and conduct their own research. No prior familiarity with the principles, procedures, or terminology of educational research is required. Chapters are: (1) "Educational Research: Its Nature and Rules of Operation"; (2) "Types…

This document was prepared in connection with a three-year longitudinal study of career expectations of high school students conducted to explain scientifically the process by which youth form career expectations, e.g., educational, occupational, and income expectations. Divided into six chapters, this document contains a theoretical rationale for…

Fifty-eight studies relating to the "knowledge gap" hypothesis (a theory that correlates public knowledge to educational level and mass media exposure) are examined in this report. In the opening sections, the theory is defined, and the early information diffusion studies and public opinion polls that led to its formulation in 1970 are…

This paper addresses two audiences--those who design education trend studies that simultaneously have longitudinal and intercohort implications, and the secondary analysts who use such trend data. Four study series conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) provide material for the paper: the…