Legitimate knowledge claims about causation have been a central concern among evaluators and applied researchers for several decades and often have been the subject of heated debates. In recent years these debates have resurfaced with a renewed intensity, due in part to the priority currently being given to randomized experiments by many funders…

Some form of a short interrupted time series (ITS) is often used to evaluate state and national programs. An ITS design with a single treatment group assumes that the pretest functional form can be validly estimated and extrapolated into the postintervention period where it provides a valid counterfactual. This assumption is problematic. Ambiguous…

National Institute of Education (NIE) research priorities indicate the use of panel measures only during the time children are in Follow Through programs and further seem to indicate that only implementation variables should be measured. This paper raises questions about the desirability of the narrow focus implied by the NIE priorities, the…