Education Panel Session Comments and Points for Discussion

1. Education Panel SessionComments and Points for Discussion Sandra Jo Wilson Vanderbilt University Editor, Campbell Collaboration Education Coordinating Group

2. Truancy Interventions • Focused on students already exhibiting attendance problems. • Broad inclusion criteria in terms of study designs. • Statistically significant effects on attendance outcomes. • Also, significant variability in those effects. • And, some question about the clinical significance.

4. What moderates the effects of truancy interventions? • A variety of moderators was examined, including publication type and research design, participant characteristics, and intervention characteristics. • No moderator was significantly associated with larger or smaller treatment effects. • Small sample makes it difficult to detect significant moderators. • But, interesting that different modalities had similar effects, and that participant characteristics were not influential.

5. Volunteer Tutoring • Update of a previous review • Intervention scope is similar to the attendance intervention review • Participant scope is broader • Broader array of outcomes • Inclusion regarding research designs more stringent • Statistically significant affects on most of the achievement outcomes • Comprehension and mathematics not significant

6. Updating a Previous Review • Including newly available literature and broadening the geographic scope • This should give us greater opportunities for examining variability • New innovations in meta-analysis methodology make updating reviews attractive from a methodological standpoint, in addition to the obvious policy relevance.

7. Discussion Points • What challenges did you face in narrowing down your question? • What challenges did you face in gathering necessary data from source studies? • What areas of support would make it easier for you to do a review like this in the future? • What were the difficult choices you had to make during the study collection process or the review process?

8. Scoping a Review • The research question • Are you interested in whether a particular program is effective vs. are you interested in what best improves some problem? • What research designs would be the best for answering such a question? • What designs are actually used.

9. Other Scoping Considerations • Your constituents • Your funding agency • The users • Budget

10. Challenges in the Conduct of a Review • Definitional and language challenges • Has implications for your search, for the scope, for how you combine (or not) outcomes in a meta-analysis, and for moderator analysis • What is truancy, how is it different from school refusal or attendance problems? • Programs with different labels but the same content? • Missing or vaguely reported data in primary studies

11. Support and Training for Conducting a Review • Creating the ideal review team • Content and methods experts • Making contact with other groups who may have access to different resources • Can help with the search and with definitional issues

12. Other Discussion Points? • Reporting relevant and useful reviews • How do we create useful systematic reviews? • Questions for our review authors? • Other topics?

13. Thank you to Brandy and Sarah And our audience! Sandra Jo Wilson email: sandra.j.wilson@vanderbilt.edu