MITER events

Upcoming MITER events are listed on this page. Follow the links to pages describing details about each event.

Annual MITER Lecture in the Education Sciences

Video of session is available from the link below.

Causal Conclusions from Quasi-experimental data? presented by William Shadish, University of California, Meced
February 22, 2008

Early social experiments in the 1960s encountered significant technical and logistical problems, leading some researchers to prefer other methodologies. During the last 10 years, however, experiments have re-emerged as a more widely-used methodology. This talk will review the events that prompted this renaissance, and then examine progress in the use of several different kinds of designs: the randomized experiment, the regression discontinuity design, and the simple nonequivalent comparison group design with a pretest. For two quasi-experimental designs, empirical studies now suggest that they can provide estimates of effects that are as good as those from randomized experiments—although we still have much to learn about the conditions under which this optimistic conclusion might hold.

Contact Peggy Ferdinand, 612-626-8269 or mlif@umn.edu for more details.