Complex surveys are often used to estimate causal effects regarding the effects of interventions or exposures of interest. Propensity scores (Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1983) have emerged as one popular and effective tool for causal inference in non-experimental studies, as they can help ensure that groups being compared are similar with respect to a…

Randomized experiments are generally considered to provide the strongest basis for causal inferences about cause and effect. Consequently randomized field trials have been increasingly used to evaluate the effects of education interventions, products, and services. Populations of interest in education are often hierarchically structured (such as…

Given the necessity to bridge the gap between what happened and what is likely to happen, this paper aims to explore how to apply Bayesian inference to cost-effectiveness analysis so as to capture the uncertainty of a ratio-type efficiency measure. The first part of the paper summarizes the characteristics of the evaluation data that are commonly…

Cluster randomized experiments are ubiquitous in modern education research. Although a variety of modeling approaches are used to analyze these data, perhaps the most common methodology is a normal mixed effects model where some effects, such as the treatment effect, are regarded as fixed, and others, such as the effect of group random assignment…

When randomized experiments cannot be conducted in practice, propensity score (PS) techniques for matching treated and control units are frequently used for estimating causal treatment effects from observational data. Despite the popularity of PS techniques, they are not yet well studied for matching multilevel data where selection into treatment…

Randomized experiments are commonly used to evaluate if particular interventions improve student achievement. While these experiments can establish that a treatment actually "causes" changes, typically the participants are not randomly selected from a well-defined population and therefore the results do not readily generalize. Three…

Access to Head Start has been shown to improve children's preschool experiences and school readiness on selected factors through the end of 1st grade. Two more years of follow-up, through the end of 3rd grade, can now be examined to determine whether these effects continue into the middle elementary grades. The statistical design and impact…

One purpose of educational research is to provide information about the likely impact of interventions or treatments on policy-relevant populations of students. Randomized experiments are useful for estimating the causal effects of interventions on the students in schools that participate in the experiments. Unfortunately, the samples of schools…