Benita Blachman is our colleague. We have worked closely with her for several years. You may be interested to know that in her current intervention studies, we are providing some of the methodological expertise. Her current studies now are designed to use multi-level models of the type commonly recommended for instructional research and are designed so that individual change models can be used. It receives an independent review by a group of peers on a study section.
Program is independent of review.
Program cannot fund studies that don't pass muster under peer review. This is the same model used to fund all biomedical research in the National Institutes of Health. This actually depends more on whether the investigator has funding. If they have funding, you can be assured that they will typically hire research assistants to do data collection and data entry. The notions about the mismatch between the number of students and number of variables, absence of explicit experimental design, and use of the wrong statistical tests is simply incorrect.