A federal clearinghouse rates which school programmes have evidence

The short answer

Before trusting a claim that an app or programme is backed by research, it is worth checking whether any study of it has actually met a recognised bar for research quality. The US government's What Works Clearinghouse exists for exactly that check, and for many popular products the honest answer is that no study yet clears its bar.

What the evidence says

The What Works Clearinghouse is run by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance within the US Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. It reviews education research and publishes several kinds of product: Practice Guides, which give evidence-based recommendations to educators; Intervention Reports, which summarise the highest-quality research on a specific programme or practice; Reviews of Individual Studies; and downloadable data from its reviews. To decide what counts as high quality, the clearinghouse applies its own Procedures and Standards Handbook, currently Version 5.0, issued in August 2022 and revised that December, which sets separate design standards for conventional group studies and for single-case research designs. As retrieved on 16 September 2026, the site organises its library through a search tool that lets a parent, teacher or researcher filter by topic area and grade level, from preschool through postsecondary.

For context

A clearinghouse rating is a statement about study design, not a guarantee that a programme works everywhere. When the site or an intervention report says no studies meet its standards, that usually means either no rigorous evaluation has been attempted, or the evaluations that exist have a design flaw the standards are built to catch, such as no comparison group, or a comparison group that was not equivalent to begin with. It does not automatically mean the programme fails to help children; it means the evidence available cannot yet support a confident claim either way. Because standards and handbooks are updated periodically, a rating given under an older version may reflect different criteria than one given today, which is part of why the clearinghouse treats its handbook as a living document rather than a fixed rulebook.

A practical next step

Before adopting a marketed learning app or programme, you could search its name on the clearinghouse's site to see whether any study of it appears at all, and if so, which of the standards it met.

• Has this specific programme, not just its general category, been reviewed by the clearinghouse?
• If a study exists, did it meet the design standards without reservations, with reservations, or not at all?
• Is the evidence based on children similar in age and setting to the ones who would actually use it?

A clearinghouse cannot tell a family what will work for one particular child, but it can tell them, plainly, whether anyone has actually checked.