Recognizing that standardized instructional treatments may not be equally effective across contexts, a growing number of scholars are arguing that the strategy of adopting packaged programs and striving to implement them faithfully is neither realistic nor desirable. An alternative view is that scaling up educational treatments requires balancing…

ThinkForward is a coaching programme, developed by Impetus Private Equity Foundation, which is designed to support secondary school pupils. ThinkForward is targeted at pupils who have been identified as being at high risk of not being in education, employment or training (NEET) following the completion of compulsory education. Coaches are assigned…

Powerful Learning Conversations (PLC) sought to improve the feedback that teachers give to pupils in Year 9, by training them to apply techniques used in sports coaching. It is based on the idea that feedback in sports coaching is often provided immediately after a task is performed, and delivered in a way that children are more likely to respond…

Estimates of fidelity of implementation are essential to interpret the effects of educational interventions in randomized controlled trials (RCTs). While random assignment protects against many threats to validity, and therefore provides the best approximation to a true counterfactual condition, it does not ensure that the treatment condition…

We report on an effectiveness evaluation of the Youth Empowerment Solutions (YES) program. YES applies empowerment theory to an after-school program for middle school students. YES is an active learning curriculum designed to help youth gain confidence in themselves, think critically about their community, and work with adults to create positive…

Background: In England, there is a growing need to improve the lives of secondary school students who are defined as disadvantaged and to support these students in their attainment and attitudes to secondary school science. Purpose: This paper reports on a project designed to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds by pairing them with…

We present results of an experimental study of an urban, museum-based science teacher PD programme. A total of 125 teachers and 1676 of their students in grades 4-8 were tested at the beginning and end of the school year in which the PD programme took place. Teachers and students were assessed on subject content knowledge and attitudes towards…

Open Educational Resources (OER) can offer educators the necessary flexibility for tailoring educational resources to better fit their educational goals. Although the number of OER repositories is growing fast, few studies have been conducted to empirically test the effectiveness of OER integration in the classroom. Furthermore, very little is…

I discuss three common practices that obfuscate or invalidate the statistical analysis of randomized controlled interventions in applied linguistics. These are (a) checking whether randomization produced groups that are balanced on a number of possibly relevant covariates, (b) using repeated measures ANOVA to analyze pretest-posttest designs, and…

In the 2014 report, "Closing the Achievement Gap Through Modification of Neurocognitive and Neuroendocrine Function: Results from a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial of an Innovative Approach to the Education of Children in Kindergarten," researchers examined the impacts of "Tools of the Mind" on cognitive and academic…

A cluster-randomized trial (CRT) relies on random assignment of intact clusters to treatment conditions, such as classrooms or schools (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002). One specific type of CRT, a multi-site CRT (MSCRT), is commonly employed in educational research and evaluation studies (Spybrook & Raudenbush, 2009; Spybrook, 2014; Bloom,…

We describe our experience of using a modified version of the Cochrane risk of bias (RoB) tool for randomised and non-randomised comparative studies. Objectives: (1) To assess time to complete RoB assessment; (2) To assess inter-rater agreement; and (3) To explore the association between RoB and treatment effect size. Methods: Cochrane risk of…

Interest in scaling up prekindergarten programs for children from low income families is dramatically increasing, especially with the announcement by President Obama of support for "universal preschool." Research in early education supports the idea of developmentally appropriate practice as reflected in instructional groupings and…

Generalizability theory (GT) offers a useful framework for estimating the reliability of a measure while accounting for multiple sources of error variance. The purpose of this study was to use GT to examine multiple sources of variance in and the reliability of school-level teacher and high school student behaviors as observed using the tool,…

This article describes the use of "Teacher Impression Journals" during a larger study that examined the efficacy of an intervention program designed to promote kindergarteners' positive attitudes toward peers with disabilities (i.e., the "Special Friends" program). The journals were designed to gather information about…