An examination of the impact of changes in federal policies on the landscape of educational research in the USA

In the past decade, there has been a dramatic shift in US federal policies toward the use of experiments and high-quality quasi-experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of educational programs, practices, and policies. From a funding perspective, the effects of the policy shifts are clear given the dramatic increase in the number of experiments launched in the field. In this study, we examined the effects of the policy shifts on published literature, which is critical given the goal of building a body of knowledge on which to base educational policies and practices. We found little evidence of change in the frequency of published experiments among a sample of top journals in the field from the pre- to post-policy eras. However, there were a large number of experiments published in the newly established Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness during the post-policy era.