Programs that improve teaching effectiveness represent a core strategy to improve student educational outcomes and close student achievement gaps. This article compiles empirical values of intraclass correlations for designing effective and efficient experimental studies evaluating the effects of these programs. The Early Childhood Longitudinal…

In this article, we test an alternative approach to creating a counterfactual basis for estimating individual and average treatment effects. Instead of using control/comparison groups or before-measures, the so-called Counterfactual as Self-Estimated by Program Participants (CSEPP) relies on program participants' self-estimations of their own…

This paper reviews literature on the rationale, challenges, and recommendations for choosing a nonequivalent comparison (NEC) group design when evaluating intervention effects. After reviewing frequently addressed threats to validity, the paper describes recommendations for strengthening the research design and how the recommendations were…

Randomized trials are a common way to provide rigorous evidence on the impacts of education programs. This article discusses the trade-offs associated with study designs that involve random assignment of students within schools and describes the experience from one such study of Teach for America (TFA). The TFA experiment faced challenges with…

This chapter provides a selective review of some contemporary approaches to program evaluation. One motivation for our review is the recent emergence and increasing use of a particular kind of "program" in applied microeconomic research, the so-called Regression Discontinuity (RD) Design of Thistlethwaite and Campbell (1960). We organize our…

This article examines theoretical and empirical issues related to the statistical power of impact estimates for experimental evaluations of education programs. The author considers designs where random assignment is conducted at the school, classroom, or student level, and employs a unified analytic framework using statistical methods from the…

The "CSE Program Evaluation Kit" is a series of nine books intended to assist people conducting program evaluations. This volume, the third in the kit, discusses the logic underlying the use of quantitative research designs, including the pretest-posttest design, and supplies step-by-step procedures for setting up and interpreting the…

Propositions about what works in program evaluation are presented: (1) evaluators should be involved from the beginning; (2) evaluation should be based on explicit programmatic theory; (3) quasi-experimental designs must have high internal validity; and (4) evaluators must combat the deterioration of experimental control that occurs in…

The traditional experimental-control group method for evaluating delinquency prevention programs is questioned. It is contended that the method harms the intervention and exacerbates the deliquency problem. (JKS)

Seven qualitative issues associated with randomization that have the potential to weaken or destroy otherwise sound experimental designs are reviewed and illustrated via actual field experiments. Issue areas include ethics and legality, liability risks, manipulation of randomized outcomes, hidden bias, design intrusiveness, case flow, and…

The 9 articles of this theme issue stem from a project on alcohol and drug abuse that involved 14 projects, 10 of which began with randomized clinical trials. These papers describe implementation problems associated with experimentation in field research and the focus on ensuring internal validity. (SLD)

The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to indicate some of the major weaknesses in the design and approaches to compensatory education programs, and (2) to recommend a more appropriate evaluational design. The second purpose deals specifically with a recommended evaluational procedure; i.e., the discussion centers around an account of what…

Along with the rapid expansion over the past decade of Head Start, a program providing comprehensive early childhood development services to low-income children, their families, and their communities, has come the demand for rigorous research to demonstrate program effectiveness. This report describes the proposed design of a national study of the…