The Nuremberg Code established ethics for the involvement of humans in research, initially in the area of health and medical research. While aspects of the code have been extended to the social and behavioral sciences, program evaluation does not always implement those policies, procedures, and protocols for protecting research participants,…

Purpose: The dual goals of this tutorial are (a) to increase awareness and use of mediation and moderation models in cognitive-communication rehabilitation research by describing options, benefits, and attainable analytic approaches for researchers with limited resources and sample sizes and (b) to describe how these findings may be interpreted…

Over the last twenty years, education researchers have increasingly conducted randomised experiments with the goal of informing the decisions of educators and policymakers. Such experiments have generally employed broad, consequential, standardised outcome measures in the hope that this would allow decisionmakers to compare effectiveness of…

Existing research practices in gifted education have many areas for potential improvement so that they can provide useful, generalizable evidence to various stakeholders. In this article, we first review the field's current research practices and consider the quality and utility of its research findings. Next, we discuss how open science practices…

Within this "Adult Education Quarterly" ("AEQ") forum, the authors call for a dialogue and examination of research methods in the field of adult and continuing education. Using the article by Boeren as a starting point, the authors analyze both qualitative and quantitative research trends and advocate for more methodological…

Every year, new teachers collectively spend about $4.8 billion on their training requirements, nearly all of which goes to teacher preparation programs. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether that is money well spent. Despite decades of research and ongoing calls to improve the quality of teacher training, we still do not know how to sculpt an…

Purpose: The purposes of this paper are to provide a description of AI and to document and compare two applications of AI, one in program evaluation and another in an applied research study. Design/methodology/approach: Focus groups, interviews and observations were used to gather rich qualitative data which was used to detail Appreciative…

Design-based methods have recently been developed as a way to analyze data from impact evaluations of interventions, programs, and policies. The impact estimators are derived using the building blocks of experimental designs with minimal assumptions, and have good statistical properties. The methods apply to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and…

A new design-based theory has recently been developed to estimate impacts for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and basic quasi-experimental designs (QEDs) for a wide range of designs used in social policy research (Imbens & Rubin, 2015; Schochet, 2016). These methods use the potential outcomes framework and known features of study designs…

Design-based methods have recently been developed as a way to analyze data from impact evaluations of interventions, programs, and policies (Imbens and Rubin, 2015; Schochet, 2015, 2016). The estimators are derived using the building blocks of experimental designs with minimal assumptions, and are unbiased and normally distributed in large samples…

Doctoral training is strongly focused on honing research skills at the expense of developing teaching competency. As a result, emerging academics are unprepared for the pedagogical requirements of their early-career academic roles. Employing an action research approach, this study investigates the effectiveness of a competency-based teaching…

One factor that may facilitate a successful reunification of children in foster care with their parents--or failing that, provide an alternate route to permanency through adoption or guardianship--is children's connections with extended family. However, because foster care frequently disrupts social connections, practitioners may need to take…

This document was produced by the authors based on their research for the report, "Family Finding Evaluations: A Summary of Recent Findings. Publication #2015-01," and is an added resource for further information. The report reviews the results from 13 evaluations of Family Finding. The Family Finding model provides child welfare…

Minnesota Reading Corps is the largest AmeriCorps State program in the country. Its mission is to help every Minnesota child become a proficient reader by the end of third grade. To meet this goal, the Minnesota Reading Corps and its host organization, ServeMinnesota Action Network, engages a diverse group of AmeriCorps members to provide…

This article is predicated on the idea that, by interacting with differences of various kinds, researchers in special education can obtain conclusions that are more nuanced, sophisticated, richer, and, hence, better than when they would have ignored such differences. Based on the application of existing research guidelines to 6 recent exemplars of…