"This book offers a comprehensive, modern guide to designing experiments in education. It leads readers through each stage of the research process, from developing logic models and selecting samples to choosing appropriate experimental designs. The text covers both single-level and multilevel experiments, with clear and careful attention to statistical power throughout, as well as discussion of moderator effects. Real-world examples and references to practical tools are integrated to support both understanding and application. Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences serves as an excellent textbook and a valuable resource for researchers planning and conducting impact studies in education.”
—JESSACA SPYBROOK, professor of research methods, University of South Carolina

“Few scholars have influenced experimental design as profoundly as Larry Hedges. This book brings that influence into a single volume, grounded in the challenges of real-world research. For me, Hedges’s summer training institute was invaluable preparation for working on education field experiments, and Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences is a powerful complement to that experience.”
—MICHAEL J. WEISS, senior fellow, postsecondary education, MDRC

“I want to congratulate Larry Hedges for providing a single, authoritative new account of experimental design in education with broad implications for the social sciences and medicine. Social experiments occur in a multilevel world, where participants are embedded in social settings such as families, classrooms, schools, neighborhoods, hospitals, or physician practices. In some studies, the aim is to change the entire setting and not just the behavior of individual persons. Even when the behavior of the individual person is the focus of change, that person is influenced by peers and practitioners. We now have a book, Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences, that fully recognizes the consequences of these basic facts for experimental design in a social world.”
—STEPHEN RAUDENBUSH, Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Sociology, the College, and the Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Randomized experiments—often referred to as the gold standard of research design—are generally accepted as the type of studies that provide the strongest evidence about cause and effect. There has been a wide adoption of experimental methods in agriculture, medicine, industrial design, and laboratory social sciences, such as experimental psychology, where conditions can be controlled. Since then, there has been an increase in the use of field experiments to provide evidence of cause and effect beyond the laboratory. However, the social settings in which these studies take place complicate the design and evaluation of experiments because their social contexts must be taken into account in order for the experiment to provide useful and unambiguous results. In Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences, statistician Larry V. Hedges details how to design educational and social science field experiments that are sensitive enough to provide clear-cut evidence on the effects of social interventions.

Hedges draws on one hundred years of statistical theory and classic experimental design in Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences. Highlighting the social-structural information embedded in field experiments, he links this history with contemporary statistical methods in the social sciences to explain how to design social experiments that are adequately sensitive to determine the influence of an intervention. He covers the four basic research designs—and thirty-nine elaborations of those designs—that are used most often in social experiments while also introducing additional, more complex, designs. He brings together, in the same notation, work on experimental design, design sensitivity, and optimal design of experiments for the most frequently used research designs in education and the social sciences, emphasizing their conceptual consistency. Hedges also discusses the practical problems of how to recruit and maintain a sample throughout the duration of an experiment.

Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences is an essential resource for researchers planning educational and social field experiments and graduate students.