Three experiments examined children's and adults' abilities to use statistical and temporal information to distinguish between common cause and causal chain structures. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with conditional probability information and/or temporal information and asked to infer the causal structure of a 3-variable mechanical…

There is currently a considerable body of research suggesting that parental involvement is linked to young people's attainment at school. It is also generally agreed that a number of factors such as parental background, attention, warmth and parenting style are associated with children's later life outcomes. However, although widely assumed on the…

A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (1993; cf. Pearl, 2000). The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To…

In group-allocation studies for comparing behavioral, social, or educational interventions, subjects in the same group necessarily receive the same treatment, whereby a group and/or group-dynamic effect can confound the treatment effect. General counterfactual outcomes that depend on group characteristics, group membership, and treatment are…

Education researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike are committed to identifying interventions that teach students more effectively. Increased emphasis on evaluation and accountability has increased desire for sound evaluations of these interventions; and at the same time, school-level data have become increasingly available. This article…