Analysing educational trials: the Education Endowment Foundation Archive - Bristol Conversations in Education

This event is part of the School of Education's 'Bristol Conversations in Education' seminar series.

Speaker: Prof. Steve Higgins, Durham University

The Education Endowment Foundation has commissioned over 145 randomised trials in schools across England since 2011. They have also created an archive of their trials data which can be linked to the Department for Education’s National Pupil Database. This seminar will focus on some of the methodological exploration of the EEF archive undertaken by a team at Durham University. This exploration has included the variation in effect size estimates that depends on analytic choices, post/gain comparisons and subgroup estimates. The work has included the development of an R package, eefAnalytics, which provides tools for analysing education trials data, including frequentist and Bayesian multilevel models. The presentation will focus on the issues that such exploration has raised for the design and analysis of trials in education as well as the inferences which can reasonably be drawn from such analysis.