Medical research is held as a field for education to emulate. Education researchers have been urged to adopt randomized controlled trials, a more "scientific" research method believed to have resulted in the advances in medicine. But a much more important lesson education needs to borrow from medicine has been ignored. That is the study…

Early intervention efforts have been effective in reducing disruptive behaviors and the probability of poor developmental outcomes. Early interventions include common practice elements to improve social functioning and decrease problem behaviors that disrupt the teaching-learning process. The First Step Next intervention has been well validated…

Programs for domestic violence (DV) victims and their families have grown exponentially over the last four decades. The evidence demonstrating the extent of their effectiveness, however, often has been criticized as stemming from studies lacking scientific rigor. A core reason for this critique is the widespread belief that credible evidence can…

Relevance interventions have shown a great potential to foster motivation and achievement (Lazowski & Hulleman, 2016). Yet, further research is warranted to test how such interventions can be successfully implemented in practice. We conducted a cluster-randomized trial in ninth-grade math classrooms to test the effectiveness of a relevance…

The primary objective of the proposed systematic review is to answer the following research question: do parenting programmes for parents of adolescents impact adolescent mental health outcomes, positive development and the parent-adolescent relationship? This will be achieved by systematically searching for and synthesising the extant evaluation…

Three generations of developmental epidemiologically based randomized field trials of the Good Behavior Game (GBG) have been delivered to Baltimore elementary schools. With the collaboration of family and community partners, all three trials were directed at decreasing proximal targets of aggressive behavior and improving learning in first-grade…

In the 2016-2017 school year, the Liberian government launched Partnership Schools For Liberia (PSL), a pilot program in which the management of 93 primary schools was transferred to 8 private contractors. The pilot owed much to the importation of western policy models and was facilitated by the British organisation ARK and involved BIA, a private…

Analyses were conducted with second graders, drawn from an ongoing multi-cohort randomized controlled trial (RCT), who had been identified for RCT entry based on comorbid reading comprehension and word-problem solving difficulty. To estimate pandemic learning loss, we contrasted fall performance for 3 cohorts: fall of 2019 (pre-pandemic; n = 47),…

Poor program implementation constitutes one explanation for null results in trials of educational interventions. For this reason, researchers often collect data about implementation fidelity when conducting such trials. In this article, we document whether and how researchers report and measure program fidelity in recent cluster-randomized trials.…

Design-based methods have recently been developed as a way to analyze randomized controlled trial (RCT) data for designs with a single treatment and control group. This article builds on this framework to develop design-based estimators for evaluations with multiple research groups. Results are provided for a wide range of designs used in…

Design-based methods have recently been developed as a way to analyze data from impact evaluations of interventions, programs, and policies (Freedman, 2008; Lin, 2013; Imbens and Rubin, 2015; Schochet, 2013, 2016; Yang and Tsiatis, 2001). The non-parametric estimators are derived using the building blocks of experimental designs with minimal…

Background/Context: Early childhood education research has consistently found evidence of immediate, positive effects on developmental outcomes. Despite these strong initial benefits, follow-up analyses often reveal that these effects fadeout in the years following participation (e.g., Bailey et al., 2017, Clements et al., 2013; Lipsey et al.…

It is generally agreed that learning about the Holocaust has some impact on students. However, discussions about the nature and magnitude of impact tend to be intuition-based rather than evidence-based. This is exacerbated by studies giving insight into how Holocaust education is related to salient variables rather than studies which demonstrate…

Given the widespread use of non-experimental (NE) methods for assessing program impacts, there is a strong need to know whether NE approaches yield causally valid results in field settings. In within-study comparison (WSC) designs, the researcher compares treatment effects from an NE with those obtained from a randomized experiment that shares the…

More aggregate data on school performance is available than ever before, opening up new possibilities for applied researchers interested in assessing the effectiveness of school-level interventions quickly and at a relatively low cost by implementing comparative interrupted times series (CITS) designs. We examine the extent to which effect…