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On December 10, 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced the No Child Left Behind Act and reauthorized the 50-year-old Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the nation’s national education law and longstanding commitment to equal opportunity for all students.
ESSA offers state education agencies the opportunity to use evidence to support school improvement and better outcomes for all students. This evidence-based approach encourages state and district leaders to consider multiple tiers of evidence and examine the strength of evidence when making decisions about which solutions to purchase or implement.
ESSA's definition of “evidence-based” includes four levels of evidence. The type of evidence described has generally been produced through formal studies and research. The strength of the study is used to classify the level of evidence.
Within the law, evidence-based solutions are described as programs showing evidence of producing positive academic student outcomes. Specifically, the type of evidence backed by formal research and studies. ESSA criteria define four tiers of evidence: Strong, Moderate, Promising and Demonstrates a Rationale.
While collecting and reviewing evidence, it is important to understand the different types of evidence and how to assess the quality of each. Each evidence type has the potential to contribute to a consumer’s decision regarding the use of a specific intervention. We created a resource guide, Evidence-Based Claims: A Helpful Guide to Understanding ESSA, to help distill this information.
The chart below identifies four different types of evidence—anecdotal, descriptive, correlational, causal—and highlights strengths and considerations of each evidence type. Also, below is a Voyager Sopris Learning webinar video clip, which may be helpful.
Anecdotal
May provide an indication of the context in which the intervention may be expected to be effective.
May identify aspects from user experience that may enhance or reduce effectiveness.
May help identify interventions that are promising enough to warrant more research.
Cannot provide strong support for claims based on subjective impressions.
Descriptive
May help identify interventions that are promising enough to warrant more rigorous research.
Does not include a comparison group so impossible to know what would have happened without the intervention.
Cannot alone provide strong support for claims about effect on outcome of interest.
Correlational
Useful starting point when learning about new interventions.
Cannot conclusively demonstrate that intervention gets results because it cannot rule out other possible explanations for differences in outcomes among users and non-users.
Causal
Determines effectiveness with confidence.
Ensures only difference between treatment group and comparison group is the intervention itself.
Not readily available for many educational products.