Taming Randomized Controlled Trials in Education

Taming Randomized Controlled Trials in Education
Author: Keith Morrison
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 213
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1000089924

There is a recent surge in the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) within education globally, with disproportionate claims being made about what they show, ‘what works’, and what constitutes the best ‘evidence’. Drawing on up-to-date scholarship from across the world, Taming Randomized Controlled Trials in Education critically addresses the increased use of RCTs in education, exploring their benefits, limits and cautions, and ultimately questioning the prominence given to them. While acknowledging that randomized controlled trials do have some place in education, the book nevertheless argues that this place should be limited. Drawing together all arguments for and against RCTs in a comprehensive and easily accessible single volume, the book also adds new perspectives and insights to the conversation; crucially, the book considers the limits of their usefulness and applicability in education, raising a range of largely unexplored concerns about their use. Chapters include discussions on: The impact of complexity theory and chaos theory. Design issues and sampling in randomized controlled trials. Learning from clinical trials. Data analysis in randomized controlled trials. Reporting, evaluating and generalizing from randomized controlled trials. Considering key issues in understanding and interrogating research evidence, this book is ideal reading for all students on Research Methods modules, as well as those interested in undertaking and reviewing research in the field of education.

Visible Learning

Visible Learning
Author: John Hattie
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2008-11-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1134024126

This unique and ground-breaking book is the result of 15 years research and synthesises over 800 meta-analyses on the influences on achievement in school-aged students. It builds a story about the power of teachers, feedback, and a model of learning and understanding. The research involves many millions of students and represents the largest ever evidence based research into what actually works in schools to improve learning. Areas covered include the influence of the student, home, school, curricula, teacher, and teaching strategies. A model of teaching and learning is developed based on the notion of visible teaching and visible learning. A major message is that what works best for students is similar to what works best for teachers – an attention to setting challenging learning intentions, being clear about what success means, and an attention to learning strategies for developing conceptual understanding about what teachers and students know and understand. Although the current evidence based fad has turned into a debate about test scores, this book is about using evidence to build and defend a model of teaching and learning. A major contribution is a fascinating benchmark/dashboard for comparing many innovations in teaching and schools.

The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials

The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2010-12-21
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 030918651X

Randomized clinical trials are the primary tool for evaluating new medical interventions. Randomization provides for a fair comparison between treatment and control groups, balancing out, on average, distributions of known and unknown factors among the participants. Unfortunately, these studies often lack a substantial percentage of data. This missing data reduces the benefit provided by the randomization and introduces potential biases in the comparison of the treatment groups. Missing data can arise for a variety of reasons, including the inability or unwillingness of participants to meet appointments for evaluation. And in some studies, some or all of data collection ceases when participants discontinue study treatment. Existing guidelines for the design and conduct of clinical trials, and the analysis of the resulting data, provide only limited advice on how to handle missing data. Thus, approaches to the analysis of data with an appreciable amount of missing values tend to be ad hoc and variable. The Prevention and Treatment of Missing Data in Clinical Trials concludes that a more principled approach to design and analysis in the presence of missing data is both needed and possible. Such an approach needs to focus on two critical elements: (1) careful design and conduct to limit the amount and impact of missing data and (2) analysis that makes full use of information on all randomized participants and is based on careful attention to the assumptions about the nature of the missing data underlying estimates of treatment effects. In addition to the highest priority recommendations, the book offers more detailed recommendations on the conduct of clinical trials and techniques for analysis of trial data.

The Trials of Evidence-based Education

The Trials of Evidence-based Education
Author: Stephen Gorard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2017-06-26
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1315456877

The Trials of Evidence-based Education explores the promise, limitations and achievements of evidence-based policy and practice, as the attention of funders moves from a sole focus on attainment outcomes to political concern about character-building and wider educational impacts. Providing a detailed look at the pros, cons and areas for improvement in evidence-based policy and practice, this book includes consideration of the following: What is involved in a robust evaluation for education. The issues in conducting trials and how to assess the trustworthiness of research findings. New methods for the design, conduct, analysis and use of evidence from trials and examining their implications. What policy-makers, head teachers and practitioners can learn from the evidence to inform practice. In this well-structured and thoughtful text, the results and implications of over 20 studies conducted by the authors are combined with a much larger number of studies from their systematic reviews, and the implications are spelled out for the research community, policy-makers, schools wanting to run their own evaluations, and for practitioners using evidence.

Designing Randomised Trials in Health, Education and the Social Sciences

Designing Randomised Trials in Health, Education and the Social Sciences
Author: D. Torgerson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2008-03-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0230583997

The book focuses on the design of rigorous trials rather than their statistical underpinnings, with chapters on: pragmatic designs; placebo designs; preference approaches; unequal allocation; economics; analytical approaches; randomization methods. It also includes a detailed description of randomization procedures and different trial designs.

Implementing Randomized Field Trials in Education

Implementing Randomized Field Trials in Education
Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
Total Pages: 62
Release: 2004-04-21
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0309166330

The central idea of evidence-based education-that education policy and practice ought to be fashioned based on what is known from rigorous research-offers a compelling way to approach reform efforts. Recent federal trends reflect a growing enthusiasm for such change. Most visibly, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act requires that "scientifically based [education] research" drive the use of federal education funds at the state and local levels. This emphasis is also reflected in a number of government and nongovernment initiatives across the country. As consensus builds around the goals of evidence-based education, consideration of what it will take to make it a reality becomes the crucial next step. In this context, the Center for Education of the National Research Council (NRC) has undertaken a series of activities to address issues related to the quality of scientific education research. In 2002, the NRC released Scientific Research in Education (National Research Council, 2002), a report designed to articulate the nature of scientific education research and to guide efforts aimed at improving its quality. Building on this work, the Committee on Research in Education was convened to advance an improved understanding of a scientific approach to addressing education problems; to engage the field of education research in action-oriented dialogue about how to further the accumulation of scientific knowledge; and to coordinate, support, and promote cross-fertilization among NRC efforts in education research. The main locus of activity undertaken to meet these objectives was a year-long series of workshops. This report is a summary of the third workshop in the series, on the implementation and implications of randomized field trials in education.

Complex Interventions in Health

Complex Interventions in Health
Author: David A. Richards
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2015-04-17
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1134470568

Health and human services currently face a series of challenges – such as aging populations, chronic diseases and new endemics – that require highly complex responses, and take place in multiple care environments including acute medicine, chronic care facilities and the community. Accordingly, most modern health care interventions are now seen as ‘complex interventions’ – activities that contain a number of component parts with the potential for interactions between them which, when applied to the intended target population, produce a range of possible and variable outcomes. This in turn requires methodological developments that also take into account changing values and attitudes related to the situation of patients’ receiving health care. The first book to place complex interventions within a coherent system of research enquiry, this work is designed to help researchers understand the research processes involved at each stage of developing, testing, evaluating and implementing complex interventions, and assist them to integrate methodological activities to produce secure, evidence-based health care interventions. It begins with conceptual chapters which set out the complex interventions framework, discuss the interrelation between knowledge development and evidence, and explore how mixed methods research contributes to improved health. Structured around the influential UK Medical Research Council guidance for use of complex interventions, four sections, each comprised of bite-sized chapters written by multidisciplinary experts in the area, focus on: - Developing complex interventions - Assessing the feasibility of complex interventions and piloting them - Evaluating complex interventions - Implementing complex interventions. Accessible to students and researchers grappling with complex interventions, each substantive chapter includes an introduction, bulleted learning objectives, clinical examples, a summary and further reading. The perspectives of various stakeholders, including patients, families and professionals, are discussed throughout as are the economic and ethical implications of methods. A vital companion for health research, this book is suitable for readers from multidisciplinary disciplines such as medical, nursing, public health, health services research, human services and allied healthcare backgrounds.

Handbook of Statistics in Clinical Oncology

Handbook of Statistics in Clinical Oncology
Author: John Crowley
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 642
Release: 2005-12-01
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 142002776X

A compendium of cutting-edge statistical approaches to solving problems in clinical oncology, Handbook of Statistics in Clinical Oncology, Second Edition focuses on clinical trials in phases I, II, and III, proteomic and genomic studies, complementary outcomes and exploratory methods. Cancer Forum called the first edition a

Randomized Clinical Trials

Randomized Clinical Trials
Author: David Machin
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2010-05-20
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0470319224

Using examples and case studies from industry, academia and research literature, Randomized Clinical Trials provides a detailed overview of the key issues involved in designing, conducting, analysing and reporting randomized clinical trials. It examines the methodology for conducting Phase III clinical trials, developing the protocols, the practice for capturing, measuring, and analysing the resulting clinical data and their subsequent reporting. Randomized clinical trials are the principal method for determining the relative efficacy and safety of alternative treatments, interventions or medical devices. They are conducted by groups comprising one or more of pharmaceutical and allied health-care organisations, academic institutions, and charity supported research groups. In many cases such trials provide the key evidence necessary for the regulatory approval of a new product for future patient use. Randomized Clinical Trials provides comprehensive coverage of such trials, ranging from elementary to advanced level. Written by authors with considerable experience of clinical trials, Randomized Clinical Trials is an authoritative guide for clinicians, nurses, data managers and medical statisticians involved in clinical trials research and for health care professionals directly involved in patient care in a clinical trial context.

How to Design, Analyse and Report Cluster Randomised Trials in Medicine and Health Related Research

How to Design, Analyse and Report Cluster Randomised Trials in Medicine and Health Related Research
Author: Michael J. Campbell
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1119992028

A complete guide to understanding cluster randomised trials Written by two researchers with extensive experience in the field, this book presents a complete guide to the design, analysis and reporting of cluster randomised trials. It spans a wide range of applications: trials in developing countries, trials in primary care, trials in the health services. A key feature is the use of R code and code from other popular packages to plan and analyse cluster trials, using data from actual trials. The book contains clear technical descriptions of the models used, and considers in detail the ethics involved in such trials and the problems in planning them. For readers and students who do not intend to run a trial but wish to be a critical reader of the literature, there are sections on the CONSORT statement, and exercises in reading published trials. Written in a clear, accessible style Features real examples taken from the authors’ extensive practitioner experience of designing and analysing clinical trials Demonstrates the use of R, Stata and SPSS for statistical analysis Includes computer code so the reader can replicate all the analyses Discusses neglected areas such as ethics and practical issues in running cluster randomised trials How to Design, Analyse and Report Cluster Randomised Trials in Medicine and Health Related Research provides an excellent reference tool and can be read with profit by statisticians, health services researchers, systematic reviewers and critical readers of cluster randomised trials.