Adolescents with ASD face numerous personal and contextual barriers that impede the development of social motivation and core competencies, warranting the need for targeted intervention. A randomized controlled trial was conducted with 40 adolescents to evaluate the merits of a multi-component socialization intervention that places emphasis on…

Data from cluster randomized trials do not always have a pure hierarchical structure. For instance, students are nested within schools that may be crossed by neighborhoods, and soldiers are nested within army units that may be crossed by mental health-care professionals. It is important that the random cross-classification is taken into account…

In basic regression discontinuity (RD) designs, causal inference is limited to the local area near a single cutoff. To strengthen the generality of the RD treatment estimate, a design with multiple cutoffs along the assignment variable continuum can be applied. The availability of multiple cutoffs allows estimation of a pooled average treatment…

In basic regression discontinuity (RD) designs, causal inference is limited to the local area near a single cutoff. To strengthen the generality of the RD treatment estimate, a design with multiple cutoffs along the assignment variable continuum can be applied. The availability of multiple cutoffs allows estimation of a pooled average treatment…

In this work, we describe a new statistical method to improve the detection of treatment effects in interventions. We call our method TAME (Trained Across Multiple Experiments). TAME takes advantage of multiple experiments with similar designs to create a single model. We use this model to predict the outcome of the dependent variable in unseen…

Randomized trials are often conducted with separate randomizations across multiple sites such as schools, voting districts, or hospitals. These sites can differ in important ways, including the site's implementation, local conditions, and the composition of individuals. An important question in practice is whether--and under what…

Empirical evidence exists that enhancing students' language can promote the mathematics learning of multilingual students at risk, whereas other target groups (e.g., monolingual students, successful students, both with diverse academic language proficiency) have hardly been considered. This cluster-randomized controlled trial (N = 589)…

Purpose: This review article introduces research methods for personalization of intervention. Our goals are to review evidence-based practices for improving social communication impairment in children with autism spectrum disorder generally and then how these practices can be systematized in ways that personalize intervention, especially for…

Understanding the factors that mediate the effect of educational or behavioral intervention is critical to advancing both research and practice. When properly implemented, mediators add depth to the results of intervention research, indicating why a program works, highlighting ways to enhance its effectiveness, and revealing the elements that are…

Intervention approaches to bullying are largely preventive in nature, and even these have been shown to be ineffective, if not iatrogenic, with adolescents. Responses to bullying are limited to traditional punitive approaches or "no-blame" approaches aiming to restore the relationship between the targeted students. Neither of these…

This article summarizes findings from a two-year randomized control trial, focusing on a subset of 194 fourth graders with reading comprehension scores at or below the 15th percentile. Students in the treatment condition received an average of 94 daily 30-min sessions of small group intervention implemented with fidelity by well-trained research…

Educational stakeholders are keen to know the magnitude and importance of different interventions. However, the way evidence is communicated to support understanding of the effectiveness of an intervention is controversial. Typically studies in education have used the standardised mean difference as a measure of the impact of interventions. This…

Social-emotional learning (SEL) programs are frequently evaluated using randomized controlled trial (RCT) methodology as a means to assess program impacts. What is often missing in RCT studies is a robust parallel investigation of the multi-level implementation of the program. The field of implementation science bridges the gap between the RCT…

Background: Children with language comprehension difficulties are at risk of educational and social problems, which in turn impede employment prospects in adulthood. However, few randomized trials have examined how such problems can be ameliorated during the preschool years. Methods: We conducted a cluster randomized trial in 148 preschool…

The scientific rigor of education research has improved dramatically since the year 2000. Much of the credit for this improvement is deserved by Institute of Education Sciences (IES) policies that helped create a demand for rigorous research; increased human capital capacity to carry out such work; provided funding for the work itself; and…