Pay for performance plans are spreading across the country due to the Obama administration's $4 billion Race to the Top initiative, which places a high priority on merit pay. Through a program that involved public accountability and bonuses, the state of North Carolina awarded more than $1 billion in school-based performance bonuses for meeting…

This study examined the effect of schema-based instruction (SBI) on 7th-grade students' mathematical problem-solving performance. SBI is an instructional intervention that emphasizes the role of mathematical structure in word problems and also provides students with a heuristic to self-monitor and aid problem solving. Using a…

Across 20 years, pathways from math intrinsic motivation and achievement (ages 9-17) to high school math course accomplishments and educational attainment (age 29) were analyzed. Academic intrinsic motivation was the theoretical foundation. To determine how initial status and change in motivation and achievement related to course accomplishments…

This paper and the accompanying tool are intended to complement existing supports for conducting power analysis tools by offering a tool based on the framework of Minimum Detectable Effect Sizes (MDES) formulae that can be used in determining sample size requirements and in estimating minimum detectable effect sizes for a range of individual- and…

The purpose of this varied replication study was to evaluate the effects of a supplemental reading intervention on the beginning reading performance of kindergarten students in a different geographical location and in a different instructional context from the initial randomized trial. A second purpose was to investigate whether students who…

This study examined the effects and fidelity of collaborative strategic reading (CSR) implemented by experienced CSR teachers (participated in previous study; Vaughn et al., 2011) on the reading comprehension outcomes of students in English/Language Arts (ELA) or Reading classes. Eligible teachers (12 of 17; others reassigned to teach…

This study investigates the impact of teacher characteristics and instructional strategies on the mathematics achievement of students in kindergarten and first grade and tackles the question of how best to use longitudinal survey data to elicit causal inference in the face of potential threats to validity due to nonrandom assignment to treatment.…

A cluster randomized trial estimated the effects of a supplemental vocabulary program, Elements of Reading[R]: vocabulary on student vocabulary and passage comprehension in moderate- to high-poverty elementary schools. Forty-four schools participated over a period spanning 2 consecutive school years. At baseline, 1,057 teachers and 16,471 students…

Applied researchers often find themselves making statistical inferences in settings that would seem to require multiple comparisons adjustments. We challenge the Type I error paradigm that underlies these corrections. Moreover we posit that the problem of multiple comparisons can disappear entirely when viewed from a hierarchical Bayesian…

The summer after high school graduation is a largely unexamined stage of college access among underrepresented populations in higher education. Yet two recent studies revealed that anywhere from 10% to 40% of low-income students who have been accepted to college and signaled their intent to enroll reconsider where, and even whether, to matriculate…

This article provides a detailed discussion of the theory and practice of modern regression discontinuity (RD) analysis for estimating the effects of interventions or treatments. Part 1 briefly chronicles the history of RD analysis and summarizes its past applications. Part 2 explains how in theory an RD analysis can identify an average effect of…

In the absence of a randomized control trial, regression discontinuity (RD) designs can produce plausible estimates of the treatment effect on an outcome for individuals near a cutoff score. In the standard RD design, individuals with rating scores higher than some exogenously determined cutoff score are assigned to one treatment condition; those…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) holds public schools accountable for the academic achievement of student subgroups that are larger than the state minimum-subgroup-size threshold. In 2004, California added students with disabilities to the NCLB subgroup categories. Using a regression discontinuity design, this study compared the academic…

In this article, the author shares his comments on statistical analysis for multisite trials, and focuses on the contribution of Stephen Raudenbush, Sean Reardon, and Takako Nomi to future research. Raudenbush, Reardon, and Nomi provide a major contribution to future research on variation in program impacts by showing how to use multisite trials…

The authors thank Dr. Lindsay Page for providing a nice illustration of the use of the principal stratification framework to define causal effects, and a Bayesian model for effect estimation. They hope that her well-written article will help expose education researchers to these concepts and methods, and move the field of mediation analysis in…