What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Reviewer Recertification Training

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) recently updated the standards and procedures that guide our work, releasing two new handbooks: the WWC Procedures Handbook (version 4.0) and the WWC Standards Handbook (version 4.0). The WWC delivered a training Friday, January 12, 2018, to support reviewers already certified under version 3.0 of the WWC group design standards in becoming become recertified under version 4.0. This webinar covers the major changes to the WWC procedures and standards that are not related to the overhauled design standards for cluster-level assignment studies. Key topics include changes in the definition of a study, additional methods for satisfying the statistical adjustment requirement when establishing baseline equivalence, and revised standards for reviewing studies with missing or imputed data.

The What Works Clearinghouse is an investment of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) within the U.S. Department of Education that was established in 2002. The work of the WWC is managed by a team of staff at IES and conducted under a set of contracts held by several leading firms with expertise in education, research methodology, and the dissemination of education research. For more than a decade, the WWC has been a central and trusted source of scientific evidence on education programs, products, practices, and policies. We review the research, determine which studies meet rigorous standards, and summarize the findings. We focus on high-quality research to answer the question “what works in education?”