ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the three designs are called pre-experimental designs because they use the elements of an experiment but lack the necessary ingredients to be a quasi-experiment or true experimental design, such as pretest and posttest, and control group. Changes from pretest to posttest in Design 4 may be attributable to history, maturation, instrumentation, testing, and statistical regression. Design 5 is called the one-shot case study. In it, one group is given a treatment (X) followed by a test (O). Design 6, the static-group comparison design, has two groups, but participants are not assigned to the groups at random. The dashed line between the two groups indicates they are intact groups. The obvious problem with Design 6 is the threat to internal validity called selection. Because of their weaknesses, these three pre-experimental designs are of very limited value in exploring cause-and-effect relationships.
