Ever wonder if an idea you have for a classroom, or online, activity will work? Now there is help. Or at least there is an initiative and website you can use as a starting place for help. Like practitioners of evidence-based medicine, educators are faced with a large number of articles and reports on educational studies investigations and left wondering which are most effective. A new site developed by the U.S. Department of Education is charged with disseminating knowledge of what works in education - a sort of a Cochrane library of evidence-based education.
The Details
The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) was established in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences to provide educators, policymakers, researchers, and the public with a central and trusted source of scientific evidence of what works in education. It is administered by the Department through a contract to a joint venture of the American Institutes for Research and the Campbell Collaboration.
Through a set of accessible databases and user-friendly reports, the WWC provides education consumers with ongoing, high-quality reviews of the effectiveness of replicable educational interventions (programs, products, practices, and policies) designed to improve student outcomes.
Reviews as of September, 2004
As with any thorough meta-analysis, progress is slow. Since the launch date in 2002 there the WWC has only released its findings in the two topic areas of "peer-assisted learning" and "middle school math." A team of reviewers has searched the literature for reports of the effectiveness of specific educational interventions (activities) in each of these areas. For the peer-assisted learning topic there are intervention reports such as "collaborative strategic reading" and "formal classroom pairs." The team identifies research papers written on the topic and assigns a rating to each paper such as: meets evidence standards, meets evidence standards with reservations, does not meet evidence standards, does not pass screen, and currently in review.
If you are interested in being alerted to new topic reviews as they are posted, you can subscribe to the WWC email alert system.
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