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Home > Oxford Education Deanery > Online Learning > Assessing Risk of Bias in Education Research

Assessing Risk of Bias Using the EEF Padlock Tool

This training package has been designed to teach you how to use the Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) padlock tool to assess the risk of bias in reports of experimental and quasi-experimental research in education.

The training package consists of a series of short videos that explain the principles behind appraising the risk of bias associated with a variety of potential sources of bias in this kind of research. You should watch these videos and read the written guidance that accompanies each one. Additional materials (research papers and guidance notes) are provided for you to apply your learning as you work your way through the training.

The package came out of a research study conducted at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, which trained researchers in the use of the EEF Padlock tool and then assessed the reliability of the tool by comparing the results of the application of the tool by these researchers to a corpus of reports of experiments and quasi-experiments.

Table of Contents

  1. About the EEF Padlock tool
  2. About the Risk of Bias Training Package
  3. Introduction and Overview
  4. Design
  5. Attrition
  6. Interim Rating
  7. Confounding
  8. Concurrent Interventions
  9. Experimental Effects and Contamination
  10. Implementation Fidelity and Compliance with Intervention
  11. Missing Data
  12. Measurement of Outcomes & Selective Reporting and Data Availability
  13. Calculating the Final Padlock Score
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