Addressing the Challenges to Educational Research Posed by COVID-19 (WP-20-47)
Larry Hedges and Elizabeth Tipton
The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted many aspects of our society, including the conduct of ongoing education research, especially randomized field trials. This paper seeks to identify some of the problems that may arise because of this disruption, which may be different depending on the current stage of the trial. Hedges and Tipton identify some possible responses to the disruption with an emphasis on those that may permit investigators to capitalize on work already done and investments already made. They discuss tradeoffs of strategies such as ways to maintain statistical power of designs that could be compromised or dealing with designs that may have lower power than was initially planned. They also consider more radical changes in focus such as focusing on intervention or instrument development, methodological studies, or the codification of craft knowledge.