In 2002, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) established the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) at the confluence of a push to improve education research quality, a shift toward evidence-based decision-making, and an expansion of systematic reviews. In addition to providing decision makers with evidence to inform their choices, a systematic review sets expectations regarding study quality and execution for research on program efficacy. In this article, we examine education research through the filter of a long running systematic review to assess research quality over time and the role of the systematic review in producing evidence.

Using the WWC’s database of reviewed studies, we explored the relationships between study characteristics and dispositions as well as the differences by topic area and changes over time.

Through its design standards, the WWC has defined its requirements for a study to be considered causal evidence, which may have been one of the factors contributing to observed improvement in the quality of education research over the past 15 years. The levels and rates of studies meeting standards have been increasing over the life of the WWC. Additionally, the number and proportion of studies excluded due to ineligible design are decreasing. Thus, less research is ineligible due to design issues, and more eligible studies are meeting standards. As IES continues to conduct and fund studies designed to meet standards, and more decisions are directly tied to evidence, the body of rigorous education research may continue to grow.