"Simulation-based inference" is often considered a pedagogical strategy for helping students develop inferential reasoning, for example, giving them a visual and concrete reference for deciding whether the observed statistic is unlikely to happen by chance alone when the null hypothesis is true. In this article, we highlight for teachers…

We consider a class of multiple-group individually-randomized group trials (IRGTs) that introduces a (partially) cross-classified structure in the treatment condition (only). The novel feature of this design is that the nature of the treatment induces a clustering structure that involves two or more non-nested groups among individuals in the…

Background: Rooted in problems of social justice, intersectionality addresses intragroup differences in impacts and outcomes and the compound discrimination at specific intersections of classification (Crenshaw,1991). It stresses that deficits/debts in outcomes often occur non-additively; for example, discriminatory hiring practices can be…

Purpose: Multisite mediation studies are a cornerstone in mapping out developmental processes because they probe the mechanisms of a treatment while creating key opportunities to learn from and about variation in those mechanisms across sites. Despite the prevalence of multisite studies, a significant gap in the literature is how to plan such…

Background: Clustered randomized controlled trials are commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments. Frequently, stratified or paired designs are adopted in practice. Fogarty (2018) studied variance estimators for stratified and not clustered experiments and Schochet et. al. (2022) studied that for stratified, clustered RCTs with…

Background: The emergence of causal research in education was almost strictly quantitative twenty years ago, however, that landscape has changed considerably. The number of intervention studies fielded and completed annually has increased substantially, and the quality of the evaluations is much more robust, including paying much greater attention…

Combining observational and experimental data for causal inference can improve treatment effect estimation. However, many observational data sets cannot be released due to data privacy considerations, so one researcher may not have access to both experimental and observational data. Nonetheless, a small amount of risk of disclosing sensitive…

For randomized trials that use text as an outcome, traditional approaches for assessing treatment impact require that each document first be manually coded for constructs of interest by trained human raters. This process, the current standard, is both time-consuming and limiting: even the largest human coding efforts are typically constrained to…

When planning a cluster randomized trial, evaluators often have access to an enumerated cohort representing the target population of clusters. Practicalities of conducting the trial, such as the need to oversample clusters with certain characteristics in order to improve trial economy or support inferences about subgroups of clusters, may preclude…

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop principles and strategies for and identify limitations of multisite cluster randomized trials in the context of partially and fully nested designs. In the first study, I develop principles of estimation, sampling variability, and inference for studies that leverage multisite designs within the context…

Background: Meta-analysis is considered to be the gold standard for evidence synthesis. It involves combining data from multiple independent sources to produce a summary estimate with improved precision. Traditionally, meta-analysis methods have been applied to a large collection of studies, and past research efforts have indicated its numerous…

Emergent technologies present platforms for educational researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and collect rich data on study students' performance, behavior, learning processes, and outcomes in authentic learning environments. As educational research increasingly uses methods and data collection from such platforms, it is…

Emergent technologies present platforms for educational researchers to conduct randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and collect rich data to study students' performance, behavior, learning processes, and outcomes in authentic learning environments. As educational research increasingly uses methods and data collection from such platforms, it is…

In the complex world of educational policy, causal inferences will be debated. As we review non-experimental designs in educational policy, we focus on how to clarify and focus the terms of debate. We begin by presenting the potential outcomes/counterfactual framework and then describe approximations to the counterfactual generated from the…

Randomized control trials are considered the pinnacle for causal inference. In many cases, however, randomization of participants in social work research studies is not feasible or ethical. This paper introduces the co-twin control design study as an alternative quasi-experimental design to provide evidence of causal mechanisms when randomization…