Synthesizing Evidence From Impact Evaluations in Education to Inform Action

TL;DRAbstract

n What Works? Issues in Synthesizing Educational Program Evaluations, Robert E. Slavin (in this issue of Educational I Researcher, pp. 5-14) speaks to the need for standards of quality when we select and synthesize evidence from studies examining the impact of particular educational programs. Pointing to the dual potential of evidence-based education to change classroom and school practices and to make educational research and evaluation more central to policy, Slavin characterizes a high-quality synthesis as one that delivers reliable, unbiased, and meaningful information on the strength of evidence behind each program (p. 5). In conducting reviews to gauge the strength of evidence from a collection of studies, he asks that we balance issues related to research design, effect size, and the number of studies we rate. He elaborates on five

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