Project Details
Description
The specific methodological focus of this training program is the design, execution, and interpretation of randomized filed experiments in education. Well executed randomized experiments provide the strongest evidence about causal effects of educational interventions, products, and services. Consequently, they have a crucial role to play in establishing a base of knowledge for the improvement and reform of American education. Yet the number of individuals with the knowledge and experience necessary to design, implement, analyze, and interpret randomized field experiments in education is still surprisingly small. Moreover, as experiments are called upon to provide more evidence about mechanism, knowledge of how to design experiments that can begin to “get inside the black box,” is even scarcer.
Thus it is possible that, even with increased funding for research, the national capacity to carry out high quality educational research may be restricted by the limited availability of skilled researchers with training in the current state of the art in experimental methods. In the longer term, the lack of capacity to create new ways to solve methodological problems that arise as educational research becomes increasingly sophisticated may be even more troubling.
IES has recognized the problem of limited capacity to carry out educational research involving randomized field experiments. They have addressed the problem by introducing their grant programs to support pre-doctoral and postdoctoral training in educational research (including experimental methods). While these programs are an important step to build capacity for the future, they cannot in themselves solve the problem of capacity to carry out educational research for three reasons. First, the pre-doctoral (and to a lesser extent, the post-doctoral) training programs require years to produce trainees with the capacity to carry out randomized trials. Second, because they provide intensive, long term
Status | Finished |
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Effective start/end date | 9/1/17 → 8/31/21 |
Funding
- Institute of Education Sciences (R305B170016)
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