Collaborative Research: Developing Methodological Foundations for Empirical Evaluations of Non-Experimental Methods in STEM Intervention Evaluations

This research will establish a coherent framework for the design, implementation, and analysis of within-study comparisons for evaluating non-experimental methods.

It will also establish an infrastructure for conducting an ongoing quantitative synthesis of results from within-study comparison designs.

This research study will develop the methodological foundations for using within-study comparison designs (WSCs) to evaluate non-experimental methods in STEM evaluation settings.

In WSC designs, treatment effects from a non-experiment are compared to those produced by a randomized experiment that shares the same target population.

The purpose of a WSC is to determine whether the non-experiment can replicate results from an experimental benchmark, and the contexts and conditions under which these methods perform well in field settings.