DRAFT Report– Please do not cite or distribute without permission of the authors 1 Mixed Methods in Randomized Trials: Realizing the Potential, Avoiding the Pitt-falls 1 James P. Spillane Amber Stitziel Pareja Northwestern University Carol Barnes University of Michigan Eric Camburn University of Wisconsin-Madison Jason Huff Vanderbilt University Ellen Goldring Vanderbilt University Henry May University of Pennsylvania Jonathan Supovitz University of Pennsylvania 2 PRELIMINARY DRAFT. Paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago April 9 th – 13 th . The research reported in this paper was conducted by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). Opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of districts, schools, or subjects studied; CPRE; or its institutional members. This paper was internally reviewed by CPRE research staff; however, it has not been externally reviewed. 1 The research was supported through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. The work was also supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Grant # EHR – 0412510). We also wish to thank James Pustejovsky, Beth Sanders and Jimmy Sebastian for their research assistance at various stages of the work. Please direct any correspondence regarding this paper to Jim Spillane – j-spillane@northwestern.edu . 2 The final three authors are listed alphabetically.