Videotaped and PowerPoint presentations from a 2007 Research Training Institute, sponsored by the National Center for Education Research at the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), are now available on the IES Web site. Two MDRC researchers were among the eight Institute faculty: Howard Bloom, Chief Social Scientist, and Fred Doolittle, Vice President and Director of the Policy Research and Evaluation Department.

The purpose of the ten-day institute, entitled “Clustered Randomized Trials,” was to increase the national capacity to develop and conduct rigorous evaluations of the effectiveness of education interventions by training researchers to conduct cluster (group) randomized trials in education settings. Participants included postdoctoral fellows, junior researchers, and senior researchers. The course sessions provided intensive training on planning, implementing, and analyzing data from a cluster randomized trial, allowing participants to:

• Describe the principles underlying randomized experiments and their advantages for making causal inferences.
• Understand the hierarchical structure of populations in education (students nested in classes nested in schools) and its implications for study design and analysis of data.
• Select appropriate measures for assessing outcomes, describing implementation fidelity, and capturing process variables.
• Acquire knowledge and strategies for designing and conducting a cluster randomized trial.