Evidence Synthesis Resources

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Evidence Synthesis Resources

Evidence synthesis is the term for the systematic process of reviewing the findings of multiple research studies and combining the information together to get a more holistic view of the results. 

Use the resources below to explore ways you can find and use evidence research when trying to make decisions for your school or check out our step-by-step breakdown of the process of conducting an evidence synthesis review.

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How can I find and use evidence syntheses?
Explore tools to interpret evidence synthesis and find evidence related to programs and practices for school systems, school personnel, and student populations 
Learn to explore
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I want to conduct evidence synthesis
 
Learn about different types of evidence syntheses and locate tools for each phase of the evidence synthesis process
Learn the process

What is evidence synthesis?

Evidence synthesis is the term for the systematic process of bringing together information across all research answering a specific question. The results of evidence syntheses can help educators stay up-to-date with current trends in educational research. Evidence synthesis also reduces the time and resources required to identify practices that have been shown to be effective in populations and settings like yours.   

Under ideal circumstances, findings from educational research can be applied across schools and students, but a single research study is rarely representative of the varied contexts and backgrounds of an individual school or student. Evidence synthesis allows us to combine (or “synthesize”) data from multiple research studies examining the same practice used in various contexts. This process allows us to be more certain of the effectiveness of the practice and identify who is most likely to benefit from it. Evidence synthesis also allows us to generate this new knowledge while carefully accounting for variability in the quality of evidence across individual studies.  

 
 

 

Evidence use in everyday life

Each day, we are confronted with situations that require us to seek evidence to make informed decisions. But we often find that a single source of information is insufficient to meet our decision-making needs.

Imagine that you’ve just learned about a niche restaurant across town and you’re trying to decide whether the food will be good enough to justify the price, trip, and wait time. You can review a menu to see if there are any appealing dishes and then look at pictures of the dishes to learn more about them. For some people, this may be enough to decide, but for others it might not be. If you have dietary restrictions, you may decide to check the ingredients that are used in the meals. If you would also want to know what others think of the food, you might look up restaurant reviews but ignore the reviews from many years ago.

Each piece of information tells you something about your potential dining experience, but how should you combine all this information? When you turn to multiple sources of information that are considered evidence, it can be more confusing because there is rarely consensus across the sources. Some sources of information are more useful toward your decision-making goal and other sources of information may be less usable due to the biases of the source. By evaluating the evidence and its quality and combining information from the various sources, you can gain a detailed understanding of the restaurant.

Similarly, in education, combining multiple sources of evidence and evaluating that evidence can give us a more complete understanding of our options and enable us to make well-informed decisions that are more likely to produce desired outcomes for our practical issue in our specific context.