It is a healthy exercise to debate the merits of using effect-size benchmarks to interpret research findings. However, these debates obscure a more central insight that emerges from empirical distributions of effect-size estimates in the literature: Efforts to improve education often fail to move the needle. I find that 36% of effect sizes from…

Research methods are tools that can be variously applied - depending on the stage of knowledge in a particular area, the type of research question being asked, and the context of the research. The field of program evaluation, critical for social policy development, often has not adequately embraced the full range of methodological tools needed to…