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Evaluation of Investing in Innovation

Contract Information

Current Status:

Completed

Duration:

September 2010 – June 2022

Cost:

$25,359,202

Contract Number:

ED-IES-10-C-0064
ED-IES-13-C-0005
ED-IES-14-C-0007
ED-IES-15-C-0002

Contractor(s):

Abt Associates

Contact:

Reports

Evaluation of Investing in Innovation: Report

Expanding both the use and evidence base of effective educational strategies is critical to improving student learning and closing equity gaps nationwide. The Investing in Innovation (i3) Fund is one key U.S. Department of Education program explicitly focused on these goals and the first to require adherence to the Department's standards for high quality, rigorous evaluation. Between 2010 and 2016, the i3 program invested $1.4 billion to help districts, nonprofit organizations, and schools implement educational strategies with strong prior evidence of effectiveness and develop and test innovative approaches to improve student outcomes. Importantly, all 172 i3 grantees were required to fund independent evaluations to measure the impact of their educational approach. To maximize what could be learned from these separate evaluations, the Department provided comprehensive technical assistance to each local evaluator and summarized both the quality of and findings from the evaluations. Lessons from these activities have informed similar efforts under the i3 program's successor, the Education and Innovation Research (EIR) Program.

  • Did the i3 evaluations meet the Department's standards for high quality evidence of effectiveness (those developed by the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC))?
  • Did the evaluations find that i3 grantees implemented their educational approaches as intended (i.e., with adequate fidelity)?
  • Did the i3 evaluations find that the approaches improved student academic outcomes?

The contractor provided comprehensive, customized technical assistance to the local evaluators of each of the i3 grants through the end of the grant program in 2021.

A separate and independent team assessed the quality of the evidence produced by the i3 evaluations, using the WWC evidence standards.

The final report, titled Federal Efforts Towards Investing in Innovation in Education Through the i3 Fund: A Summary of Grantmaking and Evidence-Building, was released in February 2024.

An earlier report summarizing the first 67 i3 evaluations to be completed, titled The Investing in Innovation Fund: Summary of 67 Evaluations, was released in June 2018.

Data files containing publicly-available information on the impact and implementation findings from the i3 grants whose evaluations are included in the 2018 report are available for the purposes of secondary analysis.

The final report found that:

  • The most common strategies grantees implemented involved professional development for educators to improve instruction or reform schools.
  • Grantees largely met the i3 goal of producing rigorous evidence about their educational strategy. Specifically, seventy-six percent of the i3 evaluations met the Department's What Works Clearinghouse standards for study quality.
  • However, few of the educational strategies were found to improve student outcomes in grantee sites. Only 26 percent of i3 evaluations found at least one statistically significant positive effect and no negative effects on student academic outcomes.