Across the OECD, enormous effort and investment has been made to reinforce the quality, production and use of education research in policy and practice. Despite this, using research in education remains a challenge for many countries and systems. The OECD launched the Strengthening the Impact of Education Research project to respond to this…

This report describes the design, methods, and results of the 2016/20 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:16/20) conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). It is the second follow-up with a cohort of bachelor's degree recipients originally identified during the 2015-16 National…

As the number of publicly funded early childhood education (ECE) programs increases, policymakers will need empirical evidence to justify the taxpayer investment. Such justification will require a stronger understanding of the essential components of an ECE program's design, as well as solid evidence on which components, or constellations of…

The field of education is increasingly committed to adopting evidence-based practices. Although randomized experimental designs provide strong evidence of the causal effects of interventions, they are not always feasible. For example, depending upon the research question, it may be difficult for researchers to find the number of children necessary…

Whether the goal is to identify and describe trends and variation in populations, create new measures of key phenomena, or describe samples in studies aimed at identifying causal effects, description plays a critical role in the scientific process in general and education research in particular. Descriptive analysis identifies patterns in data to…

This report describes the approach that REL Northeast and Islands (REL-NEI) used to guide its eight research alliances toward collaboratively identifying a shared research agenda. A key feature of their approach was a two-workshop series, during which alliance members created a set of research questions on a shared topic of education policy and/or…

This brief is part of a series that explores key implementation considerations. It focuses on the importance of identifying, operationalizing, and implementing the "core components" of evidence-based and evidence-informed interventions that likely are critical to producing positive outcomes. The brief offers a definition of "core components",…

Knowledge derived from practice forms a significant portion of the knowledge base in the education field, yet is not accessible using existing empirical research methods. This paper describes a systematic, rigorous, grounded approach to collecting and analysing practice-based knowledge using the authors' research in teacher leadership as an…

As evidence-based reform becomes increasingly important in educational policy, it is becoming essential to understand how research design might contribute to reported effect sizes in experiments evaluating educational programs. The purpose of this study was to examine how methodological features such as types of publication, sample sizes, and…

Policy interest in international surveys on Adult Learning (AL) has increased strongly. AL survey data are used as benchmarks for a country's educational system. However, results of key indicators like participation in learning activities often vary remarkably between different data sources. Stating that these differences are due to varying…

This book provides a uniquely accessible introduction to multilevel modeling, a powerful tool for analyzing relationships between an individual level dependent variable, such as student reading achievement, and individual-level and contextual explanatory factors, such as gender and neighborhood quality. Helping readers build on the statistical…

This monograph looks first at opportunities provided by research in the adult literacy field and then identifies challenges to scientific research and suggests ways to address these challenges so that better evidence can be generated in the future. It has two goals that support the building of a stronger research base for the adult literacy…

The purpose of this Guide is to advise researchers, policymakers, and others on when it is possible to conduct a high-quality randomized controlled trial in education at reduced cost. Well-designed randomized controlled trials are recognized as the gold standard for evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention (i.e., program or practice) in…

Creating a survey that asks the right questions at a level appropriate for the intended audience is a difficult task. This guide is designed to support educators who want to be confident that the data they gather will be useful. The guide is organized according to the developmental steps in creating a survey. Individual chapters correspond to the…

This manual provides guidance and documentation for users of the public release data for the student component of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88). The general aim of NELS, a continuing long-term project, is to study the educational, vocational, and personal development of students at various grades and the factors that…