Cornell University

The purpose of this study is to develop user-friendly, web-based software for the analysis of regression discontinuity designs (RDDs). These designs are becoming increasingly popular for estimating causal effects in non-randomized studies. Their popularity in education research, however, has been slower in developing, perhaps due to the lack of user-friendly software for conducting the different analyses to which RDDs lend themselves.

The purpose of this project is to develop the foundation for and launch a new professional organization to help support a growing community of researchers committed to examining cause and effect relations important for education practice. The new organization, led by an advisory board of leading researchers from the field of education and from disciplinary fields that conduct research in education, is named the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE).

The project will attempt to develop a model that predicts the performance of special needs students who are excluded from the assessment. The estimation model will potentially produce more robust measures of proficiency and estimated relationships between school-level and student-level characteristics for special needs students and provide a methodology for obtaining "full population" estimates of proficiency for all students with and without disability.