Establishing an Evidence-Based Adult Education System. NCSALL Occasional Paper.

To benefit from the support of public and private sector leaders and to ensure that all students receive effective services, the adult education system must identify program models that have empirical evidence to support claims of effectiveness. The U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences defines evidence-based education as "the integration of professional wisdom with the best available empirical evidence in making decisions about how to deliver instruction." An evidence-based adult education system would have the following components: (1) basic and applied research; (2) program model evaluation; and (3) practitioner knowledge. These three components would work together in a cycle that continually improves program models. The main steps in establishing an evidence-based adult education system are as follows: (1) define groups of students to focus on in the initial baseline program evaluations; (2) for each group of students, identify specific achievement outcomes and tools for measuring them; (3) choose a few groups to begin with first; (4) support a team to develop the baseline program models for each group; (5) engage research methodology experts to design an evaluation of the baseline program models; and (6) publish a detailed description of the baseline program models and the program model evaluation methodology. (Contains 28 references.) (MN)