What We Do: What is Evidence Synthesis? 

Teacher giving instruction to grade school children at a desk

What we do

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.  

Image of individual bits of data forming into a complete image

The HEDCO Institute Approach to Evidence Synthesis

The HEDCO Institute aims to assist educators in responding to current, pressing issues in education by providing timely access to rigorous syntheses of research studies, getting the information to educators and school leaders when they need it.

Systematically reviewing research evidence can require significant time and resources, often taking over a year to complete. By using the latest innovations in evidence synthesis methodology and rapid review approaches, the HEDCO Institute can synthesize evidence to identify effective practices faster – when classrooms, schools, and districts need them most. Educators and other decision-makers often don’t have the time to wait for the results from multi-year projects. Our process is designed to meet educators' rapid decision-making timelines.

Elementary school teacher smiling as she works with students in class

Engagement With Educators 

Although our staff and faculty bring considerable expertise in research synthesis and evidence translation, the true strength of our institute lies in our continuous collaboration with educators across the country. We rely on our advisory board and other stakeholder advisors to keep us appraised of current/emerging issues in education and to ensure that our products are relevant and useful for educators across the country. We draw directly from practice to inform our evidence synthesis and to ensure we meet the fast-paced timelines of educators.

 

 
 

 

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.