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Lottery-Based Evaluations of Early Education Programs: Opportunities and Challenges for Building the Next Generation of Evidence

Christina Weiland,
Rebecca Unterman,
Susan Dynarski,
Rachel Abenavoli,
Howard Bloom,
Breno Braga,
Anne-Marie Faria,
Erica Greenberg,
Brian A. Jacob,
Jane Arnold Lincove,
Karen Manship,
Meghan P. McCormick,
Luke Miratrix,
Tomás E. Monarrez,
Pamela Morris-Perez,
Anna Shapiro,
Jon Valant,
Lindsay Weixler

Lottery-based identification strategies offer potential for generating the next generation of evidence on U.S. early education programs.  Our collaborative network of five research teams applying this design in early education and methods experts has identified six challenges that need to be carefully considered in this next context: 1) available baseline covariates may not be very rich; 2) limited data on the counterfactual; 3) limited and inconsistent outcome data; 4) weakened internal validity due to attrition; 5) constrained external validity due to who competes for oversubscribed programs; and 6) difficulties answering site-level questions with child-level randomization.  We offer potential solutions to these six challenges and concrete recommendations for the design of future lottery-based early education studies.

Keywords
Lottery-based evaluations; pre-K; early childhood; methods
Education level
Early childhood
Topics
Methods
Tags
Early childhood education
Download 02/2023
Appendix
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/7abj-ej23
EdWorkingPaper suggested citation:
Christina Weiland, Rebecca Unterman, Susan Dynarski, et.al.. (). Lottery-Based Evaluations of Early Education Programs: Opportunities and Challenges for Building the Next Generation of Evidence. (EdWorkingPaper: -726). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/7abj-ej23

Machine-readable bibliographic record: RIS, BibTeX

Published Edworkingpaper:
Weiland, C., Unterman, r., Dynarski, S., Abenavoli, R., Bloom, H., Braga, B., Faria, A., Greenberg, E., Jacob, B.A., Lincove, J.A., Manship, K., McCormick, M., Miratrix, L., Monarrez, T.E., Morris-Perez, P., Shapiro, A., Valant, J., & Weixler, L. (2024). Lottery-Based Evaluations of Early Education Programs: Opportunities and Challenges for Building the Next Generation of Evidence. AERA Open. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584241231933