Physical activity (PA) promotion is an ideal intervention target for public health because it has the potential to help individuals feel better, sleep better, and perform daily tasks more easily, in addition to providing disease prevention benefits. There is strong evidence that individual-level theory-based behavioral interventions are effective…

Methods of causal inference are not widely used by education researchers, even though they can be extremely useful tools for eliminating selection bias and confounding factors in empirical studies. For example, researchers have established that taking additional math classes in high school is strongly correlated with success in college and higher…

Although randomized studies have high internal validity, generalizability of the estimated causal effect from randomized clinical trials to real-world clinical or educational practice may be limited. We consider the implication of randomized assignment to treatment, as compared with choice of preferred treatment as it occurs in real-world…

Teacher professional development (PD) is seen as critical to improving the quality of US schools (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1997). PD is increasingly viewed as one of the primary levers for improving teaching quality and ultimately student achievement (Correnti, 2007). One factor that is driving interest in PD is…

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…

"Theory as Method: Small Theories of Treatments," by Mark W. Lipsey, is one of the most influential and highly cited articles to appear in "New Directions for Evaluation." It articulated an approach in which methods for studying causation depend, in large part, on what is known about the theory underlying the program. Lipsey discussed the benefits…

Using college transcripts, we separate the effects of remedial coursework from high school preparation. For two-year colleges, taking remedial classes was "not" associated with less academic success. In four-year colleges, there "are" negative effects of remedial coursework, but many minority students who complete a bachelor's…

In the social sciences, evaluating the effectiveness of a program or intervention often leads researchers to draw causal inferences from observational research designs. Bias in estimated causal effects becomes an obvious problem in such settings. This article presents the Heckman Model as an approach sometimes applied to observational data for the…