What is it about?
The US Department of Education’s Office of Special Education (OSEP) uses a seriously flawed design to evaluate the impact of early intervention on the development of children under 5 years of age. For more than 50 years evaluators have been warned against the use of the single group pre-post comparison design to assess the impact of services. Nevertheless this design, which produces misleading findings, has been adopted by OSEP for its child outcomes evaluation process.
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Why is it important?
It is important to understand that the results of OSEP's early childhood outcomes evaluation are used to demonstrate program effectiveness to Congress and to document the quality of state programs. Neither the States nor OSEP seem to recognize that this child outcomes evaluation process should not be used to assess quality of services or guide program improvement activities.
Perspectives
We hope our work will encourage OSEP to consider alternative approaches to evaluating child outcomes.
Steven Rosenberg
University of Colorado Denver
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: From Flawed Design to Misleading Information, American Journal of Evaluation, September 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1098214017732410.
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