Once about Knowledge and knowledge systems, especially knowledge applied to economic development, but since I retired branching into politics, music and whatever catches my attention.
Officials from federal agencies with education programs aimed at improving America’s competitiveness in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) assessed their programs’ success and to identified areas for improvement for current and future programs. This effort is intended to lay the groundwork for sustained collaboration among STEM education programs across federal agencies to strengthen America’s competitiveness. The report identified 24 K-12 programs, 70 undergraduate, graduate and post graduate programs, and 11 informal education and outreach program with a total value exceeding US$3 billion. The government called upon the Council for Excellence in Government, to assess evaluations of these programs. "Each agency submitted its best evaluations for this review. Of the 115 total evaluations, the coalition found 10 impact evaluations that were scientifically rigorous, four of which concluded that the educational activity evaluated had a meaningful positive impact. Three of them had results published in academic journals. Based on the 115 evaluations, the ACC’s review." U.S. Department of Education, May 2007. (PDF, 87 pages.)
There's a reason that total is so paltry, say researchers. RCTs, commonly used to test the efficacy of new drugs or medical treatments, aren't appropriate for most education programs because they can't handle the complexity of the classroom or other real-world settings. Students are not pills, and evaluations that are blind to why a particular intervention works aren't very useful.
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