| Title: | The Role of Effect Size in Conducting, Interpreting, and Summarizing Single-Case Research |
| Description: | The field of education is increasingly committed to adopting evidence-based practices. Although randomized experimental designs provide strong evidence of the causal effects of interventions, they are not always feasible. For example, depending upon the research question, it may be difficult for researchers to find the number of children necessary for such research designs (e.g., to answer questions about impacts for children with low-incidence disabilities). A type of experimental design that is well suited for such low-incidence populations is the single-case design (SCD). These designs involve observations of a single case (e.g., a child or a classroom) over time in the absence and presence of an experimenter-controlled treatment manipulation to determine whether the outcome is systematically related to the treatment. Research using SCD is often omitted from reviews of whether evidence-based practices work because there has not been a common metric to gauge effects as there is in group design research. To address this issue, the National Center for Education Research (NCER) and National Center for Special Education Research (NCSER) commissioned a paper by leading experts in methodology and SCD. Authors William Shadish, Larry Hedges, Robert Horner, and Samuel Odom contend that the best way to ensure that SCD research is accessible and informs policy decisions is to use good standardized effect size measures—indices that put results on a scale with the same meaning across studies—for statistical analyses. Included in this paper are the authors' recommendations for how SCD researchers can calculate and report on standardized between-case effect sizes, the way in these effect sizes can be used for various audiences (including policymakers) to interpret findings, and how they can be used across studies to summarize the evidence base for education practices. |
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| Cover Date: | January 2016 |
| Web Release: | January 7, 2016 |
| Publication #: | NCSER 2015002 |
| Center/Program: | NCSER |
| Associated Centers: | NCER |
| Authors: | William R. Shadish, University of California, Merced; Larry V. Hedges, Northwestern University; Robert H. Horner, University of Oregon; Samuel L. Odom, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
| Type of Product: | Research Report |
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