Research seeking to understand and improve social conditions for marginalized youth would benefit from merging complex mixed methods research designs emphasizing multilevel data and participatory social justice principles. We contribute to mixed methods research by introducing a novel framework that accomplishes this task and by illustrating its…

Head Start is a national program that helps young children from families with low incomes get ready to succeed in school. It does this by working to promote their early learning and health and their families' well-being. The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) provides national information about Head Start programs and…

Every year, tens of thousands of young people in Germany fail to find access to dual vocational education and training (VET), because they cannot find a company to hire them as apprentices. This particularly affects persons with poor school leaving qualifications, socially deprived persons or people with a migrant background. In order to improve…

Upward Bound (UB) was one of the original federal "Great Society" programs of the 1960s and remains, fifty years later, the single largest college access program in the country. Recently, Congress has reduced funding and considered eliminating the program because of federal budget pressures and because the first analysis of the only…

This study was an investigation of the predictive value of perceived career barriers and career decision self-efficacy on the certainty of initial career choice among Educational Opportunity Fund Program (EOF) pre-freshman college students, an under-studied college population with respect to career development (Winograd & Shick Tryon, 2009).…

Researchers have become increasingly interested in programs' main and interaction effects of two variables (A and B, e.g., two treatment variables or one treatment variable and one moderator) on outcomes. A challenge for estimating main and interaction effects is to eliminate selection bias across A-by-B groups. I introduce Rubin's causal model to…

This study explores the extent to which differences in research design explain variation in Head Start program impacts. We employ meta-analytic techniques to predict effect sizes for cognitive and achievement outcomes as a function of the type and rigor of research design, quality and type of outcome measure, activity level of control group, and…

Use of multivariate analysis (e.g., multivariate analysis of variance) is common when normally distributed outcomes are collected in intervention research. However, when mixed responses--a set of normal and binary outcomes--are collected, standard multivariate analyses are no longer suitable. While mixed responses are often obtained in…

Access to Head Start has been shown to improve children's preschool experiences and school readiness on selected factors through the end of 1st grade. Two more years of follow-up, through the end of 3rd grade, can now be examined to determine whether these effects continue into the middle elementary grades. The statistical design and impact…

Critiques of child participation within aid programming suggest that it is superficial and insubstantive for the fulfilment of children's rights. By employing former child research participants as youth research assistants, the collaborative research design developed for my research project on the survival strategies of African orphans and…

Increasing demands for design rigor and an emphasis on evidence-based practice on a national level indicated a need for further guidance related to successful implementation of randomized studies in education. Rigorous and meaningful experimental research and its conclusions help establish a valid theoretical and evidence base for educational…

To help researchers understand potential issues one can encounter when conducting propensity matching studies in complex settings, this paper describes methodological complications faced when studying schools using deeper learning practices to improve college and career readiness. The study uses data from high schools located in six districts…

Children living in poverty are 1.3 times as likely as non-poor children to experience reading difficulties and lack key oral experiences that contribute to early literacy development. The purpose of this research was to study the effects of viewing commercially available educational television with closed captions. Seventy second- and third-grade…

The present study utilized a short-term longitudinal research design to model the relationship between shyness-anxiousness and receptive language skills. Hypotheses regarding the direction of the causal relationship, mediation, and moderation were evaluated. Subjects included 340 Head Start attendees from primarily English- and Spanish-speaking…

Poverty-related factors place children at higher risk for disabilities and also serve as barriers to families accessing services for their children and themselves. Early childhood practitioners can play a critical role in supporting families by providing services to overcome these obstacles and by working in partnership with specialized early…