well-defined threshold
RDDs can only be used in situations with a well-defined threshold that determines whether a study participant receives the intervention. We chose to include them but not other quasi-experimental designs because they can be as convincing as RCTs in their identification of average causal effects. With minimal sensitivity to underlying theoretical assumptions, IOT and AI Company in Australia
RDDs with large samples and a well-defined cut-off produce estimated program effects identical to conducting RCTs for participants at the cut-off.13 Although RDDs are quasi-experiments, in the remainder of this review we refer to the RCTs and RDDs included in this review as experimental research for simplicity. Technology Services Company in Australia
We chose to focus on RCTs and RDDs not because we believe they are inherently more valuable than studies following other research designs, but because we felt that the policy literature on ed-tech is flooded with observational research and could benefit from a synthesis of evidence from the designs most likely to produce unbiased estimates of causal effects.
Furthermore, we introduce, frame, and interpret the experimental results in the context of broader observational literatures. RCTs and RDDs estimate the impact of a program or policy on outcomes of interest. But the estimates they come up with are sometimes difficult to compare with one another given that studies test for impact on different outcomes using different measurement tools, in populations that differ in their internal diversity. While these differences can never be completely eliminated and effect sizes must always be considered in the contexts within which they were identified, standard deviations offer a roughly comparable unit that can give us a broad sense of the general magnitude of impact across program contexts. Standard deviations essentially represent the effect size relative to variation in the outcome measurement. Economists studying education generally follow the rule of thumb that less than 10 percent of a standard deviation is small,
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