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July 2008
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Empirical Issues in the Design of Group-Randomized Studies to Measure the Effects of Interventions for Children
Howard Bloom, Pei Zhu, Robin Jacob, Stephen Raudenbush, Andres Martinez, and Fen Lin
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This working paper provides practical guidance for researchers who are designing studies that randomize groups to measure the impacts of interventions on children. To do so, the paper: (1) provides new empirical information about the values of parameters that influence the precision of impact estimates (intra-class correlations and R-squares); (2) examines the implications of planning group-randomized studies for three-level hierarchical situations, using empirical information obtained by estimating two-level hierarchical models (which under many conditions appears to not be problematic); and (3) assesses the implications of the uncertainty that exists when the design of group-randomized studies is based on estimates of intra-class correlations. Data for the paper come from two studies: the Chicago Literacy Initiative: Making Better Early Readers study (CLIMBERs) and the School Breakfast Pilot Project (SBPP). The analysis sample from CLIMBERs comprised 430 4-year-old children from 47 preschool classrooms in 23 Chicago public schools. The analysis sample from the SBPP study comprised 1,151 third-graders from 233 classrooms in 111 schools in six school districts.
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