Exploring a Cross-Agency Platform for Judging Evidence: Resources for Federal Agencies
An informal interagency working group, comprising U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Chief Evaluation Office, is establishing a cross-agency platform for judging evidence (PDF, 10 pages).
Building on work from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education (See their work on common evidence standards for education research [PDF, 25 pages]) as well as other Federal efforts, the working group developed a common framework and standards for judging evidence (PDF, 10 pages). These standards aim to:
- address both reviewing and conducting evaluations and related research,
- cover all types of evaluation and research designs and all types of results,
- provide standards that are useful and relevant for all Federal agencies and assess areas where agencies may need to augment or adapt, and
- establish an approach to efficiently share evaluations and research that have been reviewed.
As the working group further develops the standards and framework, it is expected that additional departments and agencies will be involved. View the draft standards and learn more about future directions of the work, in the presentation Exploring a Cross-Agency Platform for Judging Evidence: Resources for Federal Agencies (PDF, 10 pages).
Resources
Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development (PDF, 53 pages)
The U.S. Department of Education’s (ED) Institute for Education Sciences released the Common Guidelines in 2013. This document is the result of a collaboration between ED and the National Science Foundation and seeks to provide a broad framework that clarifies research types and provides basic guidance about the purpose, justification, design features, and expected outcomes from various research types. This is yet another version of the kind of thing we already have on, so let’s update that when we incorporate the PDF linked above.