Key Items to Get Right When Conducting a Randomized Controlled Trial in Education

This is a checklist of key items to get right when conducting a randomized controlled trial to evaluate an educational program or practice ("intervention"). It is intended as a practical resource for researchers and sponsors of research, describing items that are often critical to the success of a randomized controlled trial. A significant departure from any one of these items, we believe, may well lead to erroneous conclusions about whether the intervention is effective in the sample and setting where it is tested. This document limits itself to key items, and does not try to address all contingencies that may affect the study's success. This checklist includes the What Works Clearinghouse's criteria for reviewing studies, as well as some additional items. The checklist items that correspond with a What Works Clearinghouse criterion are marked with an endnote that describes the correspondence. This checklist is organized into the following four sections: 1. Key items to get right in planning the study; 2. Key items to get right in the random assignment process; 3. Key items to get right in measuring outcomes for the study sample; and 4. Key items to get right in the analysis of study results. (Contains 12 endnotes.) [This publication was produced by the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, in partnership with the What Works Clearinghouse (a joint venture of the American Institutes for Research and the Campbell Collaboration).]