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ERIC Number: ED671229
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2020-May
Pages: 43
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: 0000-00-00
Matching Methods for Clustered Observational Studies in Education. EdWorkingPaper No. 20-235
Luke Keele; Matthew A. Lenard; Lindsay C. Page
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
Many interventions in education occur in settings where treatments are applied to groups. For example, a reading intervention may be implemented for all students in some schools and withheld from students in other schools. When such treatments are non-randomly allocated, outcomes across the treated and control groups may differ due to the treatment or due to baseline differences between groups. When this is the case, researchers can use statistical adjustment to make treated and control groups similar in terms of observed characteristics. Recent work in statistics has developed matching methods designed for contexts where treatments are clustered. This form of matching, known as multilevel matching, may be well suited to many education applications where treatments are assigned to schools. In this article, we provide an extensive evaluation of multilevel matching and compare it to multilevel regression modeling. We evaluate multilevel matching methods in two ways. First, we use these matching methods to recover treatment effect estimates from three clustered randomized trials using a within-study comparison design. Second, we conduct a simulation study. We find evidence that generally favors an analytic approach to statistical adjustment that combines multilevel matching with regression adjustment. We conclude with an empirical application.
Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. Brown University Box 1985, Providence, RI 02912. Tel: 401-863-7990; Fax: 401-863-1290; e-mail: annenberg@brown.edu; Web site: https://annenberg.brown.edu/
Related Records: EJ1310746
Publication Type: Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: Elementary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Authoring Institution: Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University
Identifiers - Location: North Carolina
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: N/A