Randomly assign students to treatment and control sections when course-level interventions can enroll large numbers¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The article recommends that claims about course innovations be tested with randomized experiments rather than observational comparisons. With large enrollments, the author argues, random assignment is feasible: "Pennebaker et al. ( 2013) could have easily designed a randomized experiment to test the effectiveness of the SMOCs." He notes almost one thousand students enrolled in the introductory psychology course each semester, making it easy to randomly assign half to a SMOC or control face-to-face section.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Sufficient enrollment to split students across conditions, as with the roughly thousand-student introductory psychology course

Constraints¶

Target Learners¶

• higher education students in large lecture courses

Target Learning Goals¶

• causal evaluation of course-format innovations

Related Strategies¶

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Robinson, D. H. (2021). A Complete SMOCkery: Daily Online Testing Did Not Boost College Performance. Educational Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-020-09588-0