Learning more from impact evaluations: Contexts, mechanisms and theories of literacy instruction interventions
If the word ‘science’ in the term ‘social science’ means what I think it means, we social scientists should be in the business of developing models for how we think the world works, testing them with data, and refining them. But the slew of results from impact evaluations in international education frequently feels like a catalogue (if we’re lucky, a meta-analysis) of effect sizes, not a genuine attempt to understand the phenomena we study. To improve this understanding, we need to do a better job of learning from impact evaluations.
