Abstract
There is another important artifactual contributor to the apparent improvement of persons subjected to an experimental intervention which may be mistaken for regression toward the mean. This is the phenomenon of random error and extreme selection, which does not at all involve the population regression of posttest on pretest scores but involves a quite different and independent reversion of subjects’ scores toward the population mean. These two independent threats to the internal validity of intervention evaluation studies, however, can be detected and differentiated on the sample data of such studies.
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