Randomized Experiments in Educational Policy Research: A Critical Examination of the Reasons the Educational Evaluation Community has Offered for not Doing Them

By T. D. Cook. 2002

243 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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Citations in the corpus

Evidence on “What Works”: An Argument for Extended-Term Mixed-Method (ETMM) Evaluation Designs (2004, background): “Subsequent phases would address program impact issues with more analytic, experimental designs that show deeper understandings of causal contingencies and co-contingencies (Cook, 2002), grounded in actual study of the program’s larger environment and underpinning theory.”
The Effects of Summer Reading on Low-Income Children’s Literacy Achievement From Kindergarten to Grade 8 (2013, unknown): “Our dichotomous code for study design was supported by prior research suggesting that randomized controlled trials yield impact estimates that are different from nonexperimental studies (Bloom, Michaelopoulous, Hill, & Lei, 2002; Cook, 2002; Lipsey & Wilson, 1993).”
The Importance of Interest: The Role of Achievement Goals and Task Values in Promoting the Development of Interest (2010, background): “The power of this approach is that it can generate information that furthers theoretical understanding and also provide practical information for practitioners who work in the real world (Cook, 2002).”
Racial Disparities and Discrimination in Education: What Do We know, how Do We Know It, and What Do We Need to Know? (2003, unknown): “In an important paper, Thomas Cook (2002) points out that when large-scale social experiments were first tried in the 1960s and 1970s, education researchers were heavily involved, with studies of Head Start (Cicirelli and Associates, 1969), Follow Through (Stebbins et al., 1978), and Title 1 (Wargo ”
Success for All: First-Year Results From the National Randomized Field Trial (2005, background): “Recently, educational research has come under attack for its dearth of randomized experiments (Borman, 2003; Boruch, de Moya, & Snyder, 2002; Cook, 2002; Cook & Payne, 2002).”
Rigor and Relevance: Enhancing High School Students’ Math Skills Through Career and Technical Education (2008, background): “The control or counterfactual condition permits the researcher to measure what would be expected if the students in the experimental classrooms had not received the intervention (Cook, 2002; U.S. Department of Education, 2003).”
Beyond the Methodological Gold Standards of Behavioral Research: Considerations for Practice and Policy (2004, methodology): “We will not re-visit these criticisms here (see Cook, 2002).”
Causal Inference and Omitted Variable Bias in Financial Aid Research: Assessing Solutions (2008, background): “, Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. N.p.: Houghton-Mifflin. Stahlecker, P., & Trenkler, G. (1993). Some further results on the use of proxy variables in prediction. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 75(4), 707–7”
A Systematic Review of Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Youth in School Settings (2015, background): “Although this more rigorous approach to schoolbased research is more difficult to implement, over time the scientific contribution of fewer experimental studies will outweigh the overall benefits obtained from multiple non-experimental designs (Cook 2002).”
Effects and side effects of inspections and accountability in education: an overview of empirical studies (2007, background): “It is, in any event, typical that the studies make almost no use of research designs that focus more strongly on exposing causal relationships, such as the use of control groups and more quasi-experimental approaches (see for example Oosterbeek, 2001; Cook, 2002; Shadish et al., 2002).”
Experimental designs for identifying causal mechanisms (2013, background): “This perspective, which can be seen in early works on causality such as Mackie (1965) and Rothman (1976), has recently been formalized under the sufficient cause framework (e.g. Rothman and Greenland (2005) and VanderWeele and Robins (2007)). VanderWeele (2009) formally studied the relationship of t”
The Use of Matching Methods in Higher Education Research: Answering Whether Attendance at a 2-Year Institution Results in Differences in Educational Attainment (2009, background): “They also note that researchers such as Cook (2002) , Lagemann (1999, 2000), Shavelson and Berliner (1988), and Weiss (1999) have argued that without appealing to rigorous designs and methods, “it is difficult to accumulate a knowledge base that has value for practice or future study” (Schneider et”
Universal Interventions: Fully Exploring Their Impacts and Potential to Produce Population-Level Impacts (2017, background): “…universal prevention education mental health promotion methods of analysis Trials of educational interventions have increased in number dramatically during the past two decades, driven in part by a push for greater accountability for funding across the federal and state governments (Cook, 2002).”
Shaping Policies Related to Developmental Education: An Evaluation Using the Regression-Discontinuity Design (2006, background): “Another potential threat to the internal validity of this evaluation is posed by what Cook and Campbell (1979) termed differential attrition.”
Remediation in the Community College (2008, background): “Among other reasons for this, Cook (2002) argues that philosophical and practical reasons undermine the potential benefits of experiments in education.”
What Would It Take to Change an Inference? Using Rubin’s Causal Model to Interpret the Robustness of Causal Inferences (2013, methodology): “Education is fundamentally a pragmatic enterprise (e.g., National Research Council, 2002; Raudenbush, 2005), with the ultimate goal of educational research to inform choices about curricula, pedagogy, practices, or school organization (e.g., Bulterman-Bos, 2008; Cook, 2002).”
The Effects of Student Composition on School Outcomes (2004, background): “Cook (2002) has examined why this may be so, and goes on to show how such designs might become more widespread in educational research.”