Randomized controlled trials have proliferated in education, in part because they provide an unbiased estimator for the causal impact of interventions. It is increasingly recognized that many such trials in education have low power to detect an effect if indeed there is one. However, it is less well known that low powered trials tend to…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) is an initiative of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which was established under the Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002. It is an important part of IES's strategy to use rigorous and relevant research, evaluation, and statistics to improve the nation's education system.…

The purpose of this study was to develop and investigate an employer-based 9-month intervention for high school youth with autism spectrum disorder to learn job skills and acquire employment. The intervention modified a program titled Project SEARCH and incorporated the use of applied behavior analysis to develop Project SEARCH plus Autism…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) systematic review process is the basis of many of its products, enabling the WWC to use consistent, objective, and transparent standards and procedures in its reviews, while also ensuring comprehensive coverage of the relevant literature. The WWC systematic review process consists of five steps: (1) Developing…

This multiyear scale-up effectiveness study of Open Court Reading (OCR) involved approximately 4,500 students and more than 1,000 teachers per year in Grades K-5 from 49 elementary schools in seven districts across the country. Using a school-level cluster randomized trial design, we assessed the implementation and effectiveness of Open Court…

In this longitudinal study, the cross-language transfer from second language (L2) to first language (L1) was examined among Spanish-speaking English-language learners in an English intervention (Grades 1-3) in the southwest United States. Path analysis revealed statistically significant transfers (ps < 0.05) for the treatment group from English…

In a cluster-randomized study, we investigate the impact of an argument-based approach to teaching science in elementary school on science learning and critical thinking skills. Forty-eight schools participated in the study, with data on 9,963 students across the 2 years of the intervention. Annual standardized tests assessing science content…

Background: Adapted parenting support may alleviate the high levels of parenting stress experienced by many parents with intellectual disabilities. Methods: Parents with mild intellectual disabilities or borderline intellectual functioning were randomized to experimental (n = 43) and control (n = 42) conditions. Parents in both groups received…

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) offers publicly funded vouchers to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250% of the poverty line, allowing them to enroll in participating private schools. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012. This article…

I discuss three common practices that obfuscate or invalidate the statistical analysis of randomized controlled interventions in applied linguistics. These are (a) checking whether randomization produced groups that are balanced on a number of possibly relevant covariates, (b) using repeated measures ANOVA to analyze pretest-posttest designs, and…

This study evaluated two 20-week reading interventions for pupils entering secondary school with reading difficulties. The interventions were delivered by trained teaching assistants (three 35-min sessions per week). 287 pupils (ages 11-13) from 27 schools were randomly allocated to three groups: reading intervention (targeting word recognition…

Although high school graduation rates are rising--the national rate was 82 percent during the 2013/14 school year (U.S. Department of Education, 2015)--dropping out remains a persistent problem in the Midwest and nationally. Many schools now use early warning systems to identify students who are at risk of not graduating, with the goal of…

Motivational interviewing (MI) is a brief client-centred intervention that increases intrinsic motivation for change. Little research has been conducted on MI to promote academic behaviours, but two studies found that one session of MI did improve middle-school students' math grades [Strait, G., Smith, B., McQuillin, S., Terry, J., Swan, S., &…

"Un Buen Comienzo" [A Good Start] was a professional development program implemented with prekindergarten and kindergarten teachers in Chilean public schools serving low-income families. In a randomized trial, the program showed moderate to large impacts on classroom quality but no impacts on targeted child outcomes. To unpack these…

'Increasing Pupil Motivation' was designed to improve attainment of the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) by providing incentives to increase pupil effort in Year 11. Two schemes for incentivising pupil effort were implemented. The first provided a financial incentive, where pupils were told they had £80 ($110.66) at the beginning…