Recommendations for the Use of Experimental Designs in Management Education Research

Hamdani et al. recently provided guidance for prospective authors on a wide range of issues encountered in quantitative research papers submitted for review at the Journal of Management Education. Building on their insights, this essay focuses on experimental designs and provides more specific guidance and recommendations for conducting valid and powerful research. I review the types of experimental designs, statistical tests, and measures that are commonly used in the management education literature and thus provide some sense of the state of practice to date while including specific examples of effective research and analytical techniques. As will be shown, methodological weaknesses exist even in published papers, and so the guidance should be useful to new and experienced authors alike.