It is a healthy exercise to debate the merits of using effect-size benchmarks to interpret research findings. However, these debates obscure a more central insight that emerges from empirical distributions of effect-size estimates in the literature: Efforts to improve education often fail to move the needle. I find that 36% of effect sizes from…

As the number of publicly funded early childhood education (ECE) programs increases, policymakers will need empirical evidence to justify the taxpayer investment. Such justification will require a stronger understanding of the essential components of an ECE program's design, as well as solid evidence on which components, or constellations of…

Bayesian statistical methods have become more feasible to implement with advances in computing but are not commonly used in educational research. In contrast to frequentist approaches that take hypotheses (and the associated parameters) as fixed, Bayesian methods take data as fixed and hypotheses as random. This difference means that Bayesian…