REVIEW OF EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS AND METHODS IN ECONOMICS OF EDUCATION RESEARCH

The field of economics of education has been receiving constant attention with the advent of growth theories stating how education can produce sustainable long-run economic growth and increase people’s skills (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2015; Mincer, 1974). Despite its universal relevance, educational research has not been placed on the same scale with fields such as medicine due to seldom usage of robust quantitative research and the dearth of causal inferences (Creemers, Kyriakides, & Sammons, 2010). Given this, leading countries in educational research such as the United States (Scimago Journal & Country Rank, 2018) have been initiating “repeated calls for education policy to rely on a foundation of scientifically based research” (Angrist, 2003, para. 1) to nudge the field of education towards using rigorous and innovative methodological methods and experiments (Murnane & Willett, 2011). Using an experimental method is most suitable when the research aims to test the impact of intervention within the respected field of research (Beach & Pedersen, 2016). Henceforward, this paper addresses the opportunities and challenges of using experimental methods in educational interventions, particularly randomized control trials (RCT) and quasi-experiments that test the impact of financial incentives to increase student outcomes. The first section is an overview of experimental designs, followed by sections delineating on RCTs and quasi-experiments, and discussing empirical studies that employ such methods. It should be noted that this paper argues in favor of neither quantitative nor qualitative research methods as both methods can produce quality research if implemented rigorously (Lodico, Spaulding, & Voegtle, 2010).