Managing group random assignment in UpGrade
Running randomized trials has become standard practice for many software developers [5], but it is much less common within educational software. One of the barriers to running experiments in educational contexts is that instruction often takes place in groups, and it is undesirable to have different students within a group be assigned to different conditions within the learning experiment. Thus, experiment assignment must take into account the student’s membership in a group (e.g., a class, the set of students taught by a particular teacher, a school or a school district). The assignment of individuals to condition as a group is called “group random assignment” (sometimes called “cluster random assignment”) [2]. Consistently managing group random assignment, particularly at scale, is a difficult task. We have developed the free and open source UpGrade platform to help manage this type of randomization.