This document summarizes a 1982 project of the National Institute of Education (NIE) in which seven scholars, representing a variety of disciplines and ideological positions, were commissioned to write papers on the effects of school desegregation on black achievement. As previous efforts to arrive at a consensus among experts regarding desegregation effects had been complicated by the variations in the subsets of reviewed studies, the intent of the NIE project was to develop a set of common criteria for including and excluding studies from the larger set of existing research reports so that each expert could perform a meta analysis on the same set of studies. The document discusses the problems that arose over the selection process, presents the commonalities and disparities in the findings of the experts, and discusses implications of the project for social policy development and for strategies of research synthesis. The document also presents a list of the criteria used in selection or rejection of a study, and data from the research of four of the seven scholars. (CMG)