Guideline #13: Produce Reports with Enough Detail for Decision Makers to Know if the Results Apply to Their Context

If you’re a K-12 educator or edtech provider, how can you make sure an edtech product will work in a specific school or community? Here’s one of 16 key guidelines for conducting and reporting edtech impact research that might help.

Edtech Research Guideline 13: Produce reports with enough detail for decision makers to know if the results apply to their context

The report doesn’t have to be a 50-page article with extensive background research and an appendix with many statistical data tables. However, certain essential elements in the report will serve as documentation of evidence at the ESSA levels. Other elements help school decision makers know if the results apply to their context. This guideline focuses on the most useful and practical reporting details for an audience of school decision makers and reviewers of grant proposals where a level of ESSA evidence is called for.

This guideline comes from the fourth section of the report, “Reporting the Results,” which focuses on good practices in reporting results from the research study. The need for evidence on quickly evolving products and the availability of non-traditional repositories is changing the landscape of reporting. We also address the question of risk to the edtech provider in supporting research that shows a negative (or not sufficiently robust) effect of the product.

A preview of other guidelines in this section include:

14. Make the research report easily accessible and invite external review

15. Make all findings from product evaluations available, as a general rule

16. In the marketing literature for a product, accurately describe its impact in non-technical language

For all audiences, the Guidelines not only provide approaches to practice, but also seek to advance the field by helping to identify an appropriate balance among the rigor, practicality, timeliness, and usefulness of evaluation studies of K-12 edtech products

This post is one in a series based on excerpts from the Edtech Guidelines published by Empirical Education and ETIN. For more information, you may access the full set of guidelines, here.