Grant Open

Deriving and Developing Tools to Estimate Optimal Data Points for Quasi-Experimental Designs

NCER

Program: Statistical and Research Methodology in Education

Program topic(s): Core

Award amount: $648,791

Principal investigator: Eric Hedberg

Awardee:

Abt Associates, Inc.

Year: 2020

Award period: 2 years 11 months (07/01/2020 - 06/30/2023)

Project type:

Methodological Innovation

Award number: R305D200045

Purpose

Education policies and interventions are often implemented in ways that do not render it feasible to use a randomized control trial to test their effects. The purposes of this study are to derive theory for computing exact statistical power for three common quasi-experimental designs (QEDs) - nonequivalent control group designs, difference-in-differences, and interrupted time series - and to develop software for computing statistical power using the derived approaches for those QEDs.

Project Activities

The software will be programmed in R and will thus be freely available to applied researchers. In addition to publishing in journals and presenting at conferences, the research team will use social media, press releases through NORC, briefs for nontechnical publications, and workshops at conferences, such as AERA and SREE, for applied education researchers.