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Compared To What? The Effectiveness Of Synthetic Control Methods For Causal Inference In Educational Assessment, Clay Stephen Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Synthetic control methods are an innovative matching technique first introduced within the economics and political science literature that have begun to find application in educational research as well. Synthetic controls create an aggregate-level, time-series comparison for a single treated unit of interest for causal inference with observational data. However, the strict statistical assumptions associated with matching methods for causal inference raise concerns for unobserved bias related to some data models and availability. The small but increasing set of existing synthetic controls studies with student achievement measures as the outcome of interest suggest that research is warranted into the effectiveness of …