A popular design in large-scale educational assessments as well as any other type of survey is the balanced incomplete block design. The design is based on an item pool split into a set of blocks of items that are assigned to sets of "assessment booklets.
The balanced incomplete block design is not suitable for the evaluation of complex interventions. In quality of care research, the balanced incomplete block BIB design is regularly claimed to have been used when evaluating complex interventions.
In this article, we reflect on the appropriateness of using this design for evaluating complex interventions. Literature study using PubMed and handbooks. After studying various articles on health services research that claim to have applied the BIB and the original methodological literature on this design , it became clear that the applied method is in fact not a BIB design.
We conclude that the use of this design is not suited for evaluating complex interventions. We stress that, to prevent improper use of terms, more attention should be paid to proper referencing of the original methodological literature.
All rights reserved. Two studies were conducted on block building in adolescents, assessing middle school Study 1 and high school students Study 2. Students were asked to build something interesting with blocks. In both samples, the same pattern of gender differences were found; boys built taller structures than girls, and balanced a larger number of blocks on a…. Factor levels for density comparisons in the split- block spacing design.
