查看文章

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted many aspects of our society, including the conduct of ongoing education research, especially randomized field trials. This paper seeks to identify some of the problems that may arise because of this disruption, which may be different depending on the current stage of the trial. Hedges and Tipton identify some possible responses to the disruption with an emphasis on those that may permit investigators to capitalize on work already done and investments already made. They discuss tradeoffs of strategies such as ways to maintain statistical power of designs that could be compromised or dealing with designs that may have lower power than was initially planned. They also consider more radical changes in focus such as focusing on intervention or instrument development, methodological studies, or the codification of craft knowledge.

The writing of this paper was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, through R305B170016 to Northwestern University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the US Department of Education. The authors also thank Tom Brock, David Francis, Mark Lipsey, Chris Rhoads, Jessaca Spybrook, and several others whose insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper led to dramatic improvements. The remaining failings are solely the fault of the authors.