A new design-based theory has recently been developed to estimate impacts for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and basic quasi-experimental designs (QEDs) for a wide range of designs used in social policy research (Imbens & Rubin, 2015; Schochet, 2016). These methods use the potential outcomes framework and known features of study designs…

Design-based methods have recently been developed as a way to analyze data from impact evaluations of interventions, programs, and policies (Imbens and Rubin, 2015; Schochet, 2015, 2016). The estimators are derived using the building blocks of experimental designs with minimal assumptions, and are unbiased and normally distributed in large samples…

This paper examines issues related to the statistical power of impact estimates for experimental evaluations of education programs. The focus is on "group-based" experimental designs, because many studies of education programs involve random assignment at the group level (for example, at the school or classroom level) rather than at the student…