University of Virginia Collaborators

Dr. Vivian Wong

Associate Professor

School of Education and Human Development

University of Virginia

Vivian C. Wong is a research methodologist in the field of education. Her research focuses on evaluating interventions in early childhood and K-12 systems. As a methodologist, her expertise is in improving the design, implementation and analysis of randomized experiments, regression-discontinuity, interrupted time series, and matching designs in field settings. More recently, Wong has focused on the developing methods for conducting systematic replication studies to evaluate sources of effect heterogeneity and to identify generalizability boundaries of intervention effects. Along with Peter Steiner (University of Maryland), she is the co-director of the Collaboratory Replication Lab.

Wong is the lead author or co-author of numerous articles and book chapters on research methodology. Along with colleagues, she has published papers introducing the causal replication framework, research designs for replication, and methods for assessing statistical power in replication studies. Her more recent work has focused on designing systematic replications for identifying generalizability boundaries of education interventions. To assess the feasibility of methods developed, Wong and her lab collaborates with researchers in teacher preparation, special education, and reading education to conduct systematic replication studies. She is the co-principal investigator of the Special Education Research Accelerator (SERA), an IES-funded initiative to create a crowdsourcing platform for evaluating the replicability and generalizability of results in special education. Finally, Wong has also written about “better” quasi-experimental practice, including regression-discontinuity designs when multiple assignment variables and cutoffs are available. She is currently conducting a meta-analysis of within-study comparison design results examining the performance of quasi-experimental methods in field settings.

Wong’s work has appeared in the Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, and Psychological Methods. She is an associate editor at AERA Open.