Appropriate Standards of Evidence for Education Policy Decision Making

Education policy makers must make decisions under uncertainty. Thus, how they think about risks has important implications for resource allocation, interventions, innovation, and the information that is provided to the public. In this policy brief we illustrate how the standard of evidence for making decisions can be quite inconsistently applied, in part because of how research findings are reported and contextualized. We argue that inconsistencies in evaluating the probabilities of risks and rewards can lead to suboptimal decisions for students. We offer suggestions for how policy makers might think about the level of confidence they need to make different types of decisions and how researchers can provide more useful information so that research might appropriately affect decision making.