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

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The Promoting Research and Innovation in Methodologies for Evaluation (PRIME) program seeks to support research on evaluation with special emphasis on: (1) exploring innovative approaches for determining the impacts and usefulness of STEM education projects and programs; (2) building on and expanding the theoretical foundations for evaluating STEM education and workforce development initiatives, including translating and adapting approaches from other fields; and (3) growing the capacity and infrastructure of the evaluation field. Three types of proposals will be supported by the program: Exploratory Projects that include proof-of-concept and feasibility studies; more extensive Full-Scale Projects; and workshops and conferences. The proposed research attends carefully to item 1 above. 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. The project has two overarching research aims.