Randomized evaluations of educational technology produce log data as a bi-product: highly granular data on student and teacher usage. These datasets could shed light on causal mechanisms, effect heterogeneity, or optimal use. However, there are methodological challenges: implementation is not randomized and is only defined for the treatment group,…

There is demand among policy-makers for the use of state education longitudinal data systems, yet laws and policies regulating data disclosure limit access to such data, and security concerns and risks remain high. Well-developed synthetic datasets that statistically mimic the relations among the variables in the data from which they were derived,…

Recent advances in computational linguistics and the social sciences have created new opportunities for the education research community to analyze relevant large-scale text data. However, the take-up of these advances in education research is still nascent. In this article, we review the recent automated text methods relevant to educational…

There is growing pressure to make efficacy experiments more useful. This requires attending to the twin goals of generalizing experimental results to those schools that will use the results and testing the intervention's theory of action. We show how electronic records, created naturally during the daily operation of technology-based…

Education researchers have traditionally faced severe data limitations in studying local policy variation; administrative data sets capture only a fraction of districts' policy decisions, and it can be expensive to collect more nuanced implementation data from teachers and leaders. Natural language processing and web-scraping techniques can help…

The Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, with funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), has been working to develop and implement a registry for education studies, the Registry of Efficacy and Effectiveness Studies (REES) (https://www. sree.org/pages/registry.php). REES aims to increase transparency, rigor, and…

Although the research methodology literature includes empirical benchmarks for effect sizes and intraclass correlations to help researchers determine adequate sample sizes through power analysis, it does not include similar benchmarks that would assist proper planning for attrition. To help fill this void, this paper describes how researchers can…

In some experimental evaluations of classroom-level interventions it is not practically feasible to randomly assign teachers to experimental conditions. Given such restrictions, researchers may randomly assign students to experimental conditions and consider the teacher to be a part of the intervention. However, in an individually randomized…