Studies with Small Samples or Individuals

There are settings where students are placed in a particular environment for an extended period, for instance 6 or 12 months, such as internships and longitudinal clerkships. With appropriate and repeated, carefully planned assessments, we can obtain series of measurements of the same performance of interest, which help us to understand how performance changes over time, and how that change over time changes with specific events such as training or difficult situations. Even though numbers of students may be small in such settings, and it may come down to single cases in some settings, with sufficient numbers of carefully placed measurements we can use time series models to understand change. Equally, SCEDs are very popular in some fields where finding participants can be challenging, such as in Special Needs Education. Different types of models for small samples and case studies are discussed in this chapter with their relative pros and cons.

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