Contextual, identity, and cultural factors are not only associated with student outcomes but can also serve to moderate the effects of interventions. However, the conventional analysis of moderation commonly used in school psychology is subject to the selection bias potentially introducing bias into estimated moderator effects. This article…

Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and preintervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment.…

Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and pre-intervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment.…

Direction dependence analysis (DDA) is a recently developed method that addresses the need for more sophisticated tools to evaluate causal mechanisms of developmental processes and interventions. The present study applied DDA to evaluate the hypothesized mediators of a classroom behavior management training program on student academic competence.…

The problem this study addressed was whether an intervention, grounded in Reading Recovery strategies, was as effective when used with struggling readers in small groups as it is in 1:1 instruction. The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to investigate the differences in student performance between students who received small group…

Complier Average Causal Effect (CACE) analysis, a causal inference approach that accounts for levels of teacher implementation compliance, was used to examine one-year impacts of PAX Good Behavior Game (PAX GBG) and Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies (PATHS) on teacher efficacy and burnout. Teachers in 27 elementary schools were randomized…

The purpose of the current study was to use a conceptual model to identify possible causal mechanisms at play in the phrase drill (PD) intervention. The study was carried out by isolating and investigating modeling and sentence repetition, which are two specific instructional components that are typically used in PD, by creating instructional…

Children's social-emotional skills, such as conflict resolution and emotion regulation, have been linked to a number of highly regarded academic and social outcomes. The current study presents preliminary results from a causal test of the theory of change of RULER, a universal school-based approach to social and emotional learning (SEL).…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an intervention for second graders at risk for academic failure, which taught reading comprehension embedded in social studies content. The intervention included instruction about the structure of cause/effect expository text, emphasizing clue words, generic questions, graphic organizers, and close…

This paper examines the estimation of two-stage clustered RCT designs in education research using the Neyman causal inference framework that underlies experiments. The key distinction between the considered causal models is whether potential treatment and control group outcomes are considered to be fixed for the study population (the…

An analytical approach was employed to compare sensitivity of causal effect estimates with different assumptions on treatment noncompliance and non-response behaviors. The core of this approach is to fully clarify bias mechanisms of considered models and to connect these models based on common parameters. Focusing on intention-to-treat analysis,…

This study explored, with both experimental and correlational designs, the roles of (a) authentic, communicatively functional reading and writing and (b) the explicit explanation of genre function and features on growth in genre-specific reading and writing abilities of children in grades two and three. The genres used for this exploration were…

This article argues that an important source of the difficulties posed by particular concepts and theories is the narrow range of "types of causal models" with which most learners are familiar. Most learners are familiar with relatively simple styles of causal models, but many concepts and theories in science depend on styles…