‘What Works’ Rates Programs' Effectiveness

Department’s Web site for education research will cite smaller studies.

Washington

The Department of Education, in a bid to make its $15 million What Works Clearinghouse Web site more useful to policymakers and practitioners, quietly unveiled a new face for the site this month.

Begun in 2002, the What Works project is aimed at vetting research on educational interventions and programs so that decisionmakers can make informed choices about “what works”—or is likely to work—in their own schools.

The initial reports, posted on the Web site since 2004, mostly gauged whether individual studies met the clearinghouse’s tough evidence standards. So few studies passed muster, though, that clearinghouse operators worried that practitioners would get...