Purpose: This article gives an overview of the successes and lessons learned to date of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), one of the leading organizations of the What Works movement. Design/Approach/Methods: Starting with its history, this article covers salient components of the EEF's unique journey including lessons learned and…

The primary objective of the proposed systematic review is to answer the following research question: do parenting programmes for parents of adolescents impact adolescent mental health outcomes, positive development and the parent-adolescent relationship? This will be achieved by systematically searching for and synthesising the extant evaluation…

Randomized trials play an important role in estimating the effect of a policy or social work program in a given population. While most trial designs benefit from strong internal validity, they often lack external validity, or generalizability, to the target population of interest. In other words, one can obtain an unbiased estimate of the study…

The paradigm of evidence-based education continues to inform the development of policy in a number of countries. At its simplest level, evidence-based education incorporates evidence, often that provided by randomised controlled trials, into classroom practice. England's Education Endowment Foundation is in the process of exporting evidence-based…

In school settings, nurses lead efforts to improve the student health and well-being to support academic success. Nurses are guided by evidenced-based practice and data to inform care decisions. The randomized controlled trial (RCT) is considered the gold standard of scientific rigor for clinical trials. RCTs are critical to the development of…

This article addresses the gap between what works in research and what works in practice. Currently, research in evidence-based education policy and practice focuses on randomized controlled trials. These can support causal ascriptions ("It worked") but provide little basis for local effectiveness predictions ("It will work…

This document summarises key findings from the quantitative strands of a review of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) evaluations that had reported from the establishment of EEF in 2011 up to January 2019. The quantitative strands summarised include meta-analyses of effect sizes reported for attainment outcomes and descriptive analyses of…

School-based evaluations of interventions are increasingly common in education research. Ideally, the results of these evaluations are used to make evidence-based policy decisions for students. However, it is difficult to make generalizations from these evaluations because the types of schools included in the studies are typically not selected…

As a systemic approach to improving educational practice through research, "What Works" has come under repeated challenge from alternative approaches, most recently that of improvement science. While "What Works" remains a dominant paradigm for centralized knowledge-building efforts, there is need to understand why this…

School counselors are tasked with contributing to a safe and preventative school climate serving students' academic, career, and social/emotional needs through comprehensive school counseling program implementation. Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) prioritizes a positive school climate, is widely implemented in the United…

WorkAdvance is a sectoral workforce development program designed to meet the needs of workers and employers alike. For unemployed and low-wage working adults, the program provides skills training in targeted sectors that have good-quality job openings with room for advancement within established career pathways. For employers in those sectors,…

Educating children and youth with significant social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) problems continues to pose significant challenges for special and general educators. The long-term effects of challenges this group of students experience include school dropout, mental health problems, unemployment, and high incarceration rates. To date, the…

What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) quick reviews (QRs) are designed to provide education practitioners and policymakers with timely, preliminary objective assessments of the quality of the research evidence from recently released research papers and reports that have received coverage in the media. These reviews focus primarily on studies of the…

This issue of "FOCUS" discusses external validity and what rehabilitation researchers can do to help practitioners answer the question "How far can we generalize this finding-- is it applicable to other clients/patients, with different characteristics, in dissimilar settings treated by other clinicians?," which clinicians and…