교육정책 연구에서의 무작위 대조군 실험(Randomized Controlled Trial, RCT) 연구 동향과 시사점: 미국 EEPA를 중심으로 = Trends and Implications of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) in Education Policy Research: A Focus on the Journal of EEPA in the United States

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

With the recent emphasis on evidence-based policy, rigorous research designs to identify the causal effects of educational policies has been highlighted in the field of educational administration in Korea. The United States has long provided guidelines for randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the "gold standard" for evidence-based education policies, and has institutionally promoted their application. However, despite growing interest in causal inference for evidence-based policy in the field, discussions on RCT design, the central method for rigorous causal effect estimation, are still in its infancy. This study analyzed 56 RCT articles from Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (EEPA), an American journal specializing in educational policy analysis, from 2002 to October 2023, aiming to suggest implications for the adoption of RCTs in the Korean context, and analyzed the trends. The results are as follows.
First, large-scale RCTs that go beyond the individual level to schools and districts have been conducted in the United States over the past two decades, supported by the federal government and foundations. Second, RCTs of long-term school-level interventions are actively being conducted on a variety of educational policy and program topics. Third, data obtained through RCT designs are analyzed from various perspectives to provide practical information to the field. Based on the results of the analysis, we suggest implications and directions for the expansion of RCT research designs in Korean education policy research.