In fields (such as population health) where randomised trials are often lacking, systematic reviews (SRs) can harness diversity in study design, settings and populations to assess the evidence for a putative causal relationship. SRs may incorporate causal assessment approaches (CAAs), sometimes called 'causal reviews', but there is currently no…

Virtual experiments are widely used in the field of education for their low cost, strong interaction, hyperspace and safety advantages. While some researchers have analysed the impact of virtual technologies such as AR or VR on teaching effectiveness, few researchers have comprehensively explored the impact of virtual experiments on students'…

Based on the increasing interest in systematic reviews and meta-analyses of Single-Subject Experimental Designs (SSEDs), the aim of the present review is to determine the general characteristics of these meta-analyses, including design characteristics of the primary studies and the meta-analyses, the kind of data, and the kind of analysis. After a…

Looking times (LTs) are frequently measured in empirical research on infant cognition. We analyzed the statistical distribution of LTs across participants to develop recommendations for their treatment in infancy research. Our analyses focused on a common within-subject experimental design, in which longer looking to novel or unexpected stimuli is…

This article discusses the nonuse, misuse, and proper use of pilot studies in experimental evaluation research. The authors first show that there is little theoretical, practical, or empirical guidance available to researchers who seek to incorporate pilot studies into experimental evaluation research designs. The authors then discuss how pilot…

Skill in generating inferences predicts reading comprehension for students in the elementary and intermediate grades even after taking into account word reading, vocabulary knowledge, and cognitive ability (Cain et al., "Journal of Educational Psychology, 96," 671-81, 2004; Kendeou et al., "Journal of Research in Reading, 31,"…

Skill in generating inferences predicts reading comprehension for students in the elementary and intermediate grades even after taking into account word reading, vocabulary knowledge, and cognitive ability (Cain et al., "Journal of Educational Psychology, 96," 671-81, 2004; Kendeou et al., "Journal of Research in Reading," 31,…

This meta-analysis provides an extensive and organized summary of intervention studies in education that are grounded in motivation theory. We identified 74 published and unpublished papers that experimentally manipulated an independent variable and measured an authentic educational outcome within an ecologically valid educational context. Our…

Reporting standards and critical appraisal tools serve as beacons for researchers, reviewers, and research consumers. Parallel to existing guidelines for researchers to report and evaluate group-comparison studies, single-case experimental (SCE) researchers are in need of guidelines for reporting and evaluating SCE studies. A systematic search was…

This essay reviews progress in empirical economics since Leamer'rs (1983) critique. Leamer highlighted the benefits of sensitivity analysis, a procedure in which researchers show how their results change with changes in specification or functional form. Sensitivity analysis has had a salutary but not a revolutionary effect on econometric practice.…

This paper analyzes 12 recent within-study comparisons contrasting causal estimates from a randomized experiment with those from an observational study sharing the same treatment group. The aim is to test whether different causal estimates result when a counterfactual group is formed, either with or without random assignment, and when statistical…

Describes the nature and consequences of liberally or improperly applying the traditional reading research methodology and provides an argument for tempering judgments about the relative contributions that experimental studies make to the professional literature in reading. (SKC)

This chapter examines the core analytic elements of randomized experiments for social research. Its goal is to provide a compact discussion for faculty members, graduate students, and applied researchers of the design and analysis of randomized experiments for measuring the impacts of social or educational interventions. Design issues considered…

Issues of reliability and validity in ethnographic design are compared to their counterparts in experimental design. Threats to the credibility of ethnographic research are summarized and categorized. Strategies intended to enhance credibility (study design, data collection, data analysis, and presentation of findings) are incorporated throughout…

Research over the past 15 years concerning parametric and nonparametric statistics and 10 recently developed nonparametric techniques for testing interactions in experimental design are reviewed. The new nonparametric techniques are robust, powerful, versatile, and easy to compute. A fabricated dataset is used to illustrate the technique. (TJH)