This guide for district and school leaders shows how to recognize opportunities to embed randomized controlled trials (RCTs) into planned policies or programs. Opportunistic RCTs can generate strong evidence for informing education decisions--with minimal added cost and disruption. The guide also outlines the key steps to conduct RCTs and responds…

Using exogenous characteristics to identify endogenous subgroups, the approach discussed in this method note creates symmetric subsets within treatment and control groups, allowing the analysis to take advantage of an experimental design. In order to maintain treatment--control symmetry, however, prior work has posited that it is necessary to use…

This report summarizes the complex research literature on quantitative methods for assessing how impacts of educational interventions on instructional practices and student learning differ across students, educators, and schools. It also provides technical guidance about the use and interpretation of these methods. The research topics addressed…

The potential for music programs to promote psychosocial wellbeing in mainstream schools is recognised in both policy and research literature. Despite this recognition, there is a dearth of consistent research evidence supporting this link. Authors attribute this lack of consistent evidence to limitations in the areas of research design and…

This article considers various kinds of probability and non-probability samples in both experimental and survey studies. Throughout, how a sample is chosen is stressed. Size alone is not the determining consideration in sample selection. Good samples do not occur by accident; they are the result of a careful design. (Author/JAZ)

The evaluation design, which prescribes when and from whom to gather data, is described as significant because it can lend credibility to evaluation results. The objectives of this booklet are to aid the evaluator in: choosing a design; putting it into operation; and analyzing and reporting the data. Examples include both formative and summative…

Procedures for obtaining student samples for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and deriving survey weights for analysis of survey data are described. Sample designs are economically and operationally feasible, and weighting procedures result in increased precision of estimates as they account for the probabilities of student…

Suggestions, based on the experience of researchers at Oak Ridge (Tennessee) Associated Universities (ORAU), are offered on how evaluations in which true experimental designs are not possible can be designed for meaningful comparison. The ORAU conducts evaluation and assessment studies of educational programs intended to explore some aspect of the…

A survey was conducted of expert instructional design practitioners about their use of developmental testing and revision procedures. The degree of correspondence was examined between published recommended practice and actual practice, as reported by 90 respondents to a questionnaire. The surveyed sample were members of the National Society for…

Recruiting schools and kids to participate in drug prevention evaluations is no longer, if it ever was, a "done deal." Since the mid-1980s, schools have been inundated with requirements for drug programs and requests to cooperate with program evaluations. As a consequence, both treatment and control schools are harder to find. In addition, many…

Research efforts have established that the Mantel-Haenszel procedure (MHP) is an effective method for detecting the presence of test items exhibiting differential item functioning (DIF). While the MHP has been advocated for situations where item response theory based methods may not be usable, recent findings have suggested that the performance of…

In order to make policy decisions, educators must evaluate educational research proposals and projects. Findings immediately related to practice are often inadequate, omitting the theoretical establishment of principles by which we can explain and predict the phenomena of our world. These theoretical linkages to the practical world of…