Ch 7.

Quantitative
Designs
Hannah Wenzelburger
Descriptive Designs
What: studies that attempt to describe educational phenomena

Goal: understand what is happening but not to determine causality or

associations between variables

Can be a snapshot or longitudinal

Pro: provides insight to how a phenomena changes over time

Con: the change could be due to maturation rather than a specific

intervention or experience
Longitudinal designs
4 types:

Trend studies - ex. Campus health service 10 year study

Cohort studies - ex. Track employment of students who

graduated between 2000-2009

Panel studies - ex. Understanding experience of veterans

on campus

Cross-sectional studies - ex. Campus health, one time

Correlational designs
Used to understand the relationship between two or more variables
Ex. Examine the relationship between students hours of sleep per night and GPA

Two Types:
Positive/Direct Correlation

Negative Correlation

Independent and dependent variables

***CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION***

Causal-comparative
designs
Use one, independent variable that is already present

Examples
Working on campus vs. working off campus

Having a chronic disease vs. not having a chronic disease

Being a member of a student organization Vs. not being a member

Use other comparative designs other than the correlation coefficients

T-test: measures means or averages between two groups

Analysis of variance (ANOVA): measures more than two groups

Post-hoc: helps determine the different pairs of means

Experimental design
Only design to try to directly influence a variable

Best design for understanding cause-and-effect relationships

Pretest/posttest design

posttest/pretest design

Experiments vs. Quasi-experiments

Validity issues
Internal Validity
Ex. maturation, differential selections, instrumentation, mortality

External Validity: extent to which the findings of an experiment can

be applied to individuals and settings beyond those that were
studied AKA the results cannot be generalized to other settings or
populations
Ex. other variables, Hawthorne effect, exposure out of the ordinary, the
experimenter, etc.
 Designs
Six Basic Designs:

1. Single-Group Designs

One-shot case study: treatment and observation, no pretest

One-group pre/posttest design: observation, treatment, more observation

Time-series design: many observations, treatment, many more observations

2. Control-Group Designs

Pretest, intervention, Posttest

Intervention, Posttest

Solomon four-group design:

Pretest, treatment, posttest

Pretest, posttest
Quantitative Assessment -
Group Activity
Correlational Designs

Causal-Comparative Designs

Experimental Designs