Our 2025 Research Strategy

The most recent NAEP scores are a wake-up call: in reading, scores for fourth and eighth graders declined, while in math, students at both grades still performed below pre-pandemic levels. These results illustrate the urgent challenges that still lie ahead for U.S. schools and point to the need for increased access to data on what is and isn’t effective in driving student outcomes.

As an impact-focused education funder, Overdeck Family Foundation is committed to studying programs, interventions, and approaches that show promise in supporting students and educators. That’s why, in 2024, we invested $8.75 million on rigorous research that had clear potential to inform policy and practice decisions affecting critical topics such as tutoring, chronic absenteeism, generative artificial intelligence (genAI)-enabled teacher coaching, and the benefits of joyful and rigorous STEM programs.

This year, we’re doubling down on the successes of last year and continuing to make targeted investments in rigorous evaluations, field-building research, and large-scale data projects that help guide the field to “think and act with rigor”—one of our core values—and create a future where public and private funds are spent on strategies and programs proven to boost student learning.

Our research philosophy

With this key tenet in mind, our research philosophy at the Foundation is guided by several principles:

• Rigor: We value funding a variety of research, data use, and evidence-building activities that help prove and improve the impact of education programs; what’s most important is clear alignment between each study’s research questions and the methodologies used to answer those questions.
• Relevance: We fund research that is not only rigorous but also responsive to a critical need, with findings likely to be directly used by stakeholders.
• Open science: We seek to ensure transparency in methods, data, and results to encourage knowledge dissemination, research reproducibility, and public trust in the evidence we fund. And we believe it’s as critical to determine and understand what doesn’t work as it is to identify the programs that do work.

Our research strategy focuses on four main categories:

• Field-building research: Building insights about the effectiveness of various education strategies and models in addition to key trends and conditions in the education landscape;
• Grantee evidence: Supporting grantee evidence-building journeys, including validating and continuously improving program models, as well as building grantee capacity for engaging in rigorous research;
• Data and research infrastructure: Improving the accessibility and utility of new and existing data that can be leveraged to generate research and inform action; and
• Dissemination: Spreading insights through communications and partnerships that equip key stakeholders to apply data and evidence to decision-making.

In summary, we prioritize generating and disseminating rigorous evidence to inform programmatic investments across our four main grantmaking areas (early childhood, hands-on STEM education, and K-9 programs that include supporting educators and student-centered learning environments) and to influence the adoption of effective programs and practices in the field at large. Taken together, these investments ultimately improve the sector’s knowledge base, decision-making, and, ultimately, student learning.

Priority research and data investment areas in 2025

This year, Overdeck Family Foundation seeks to prioritize research funding in three key areas: 1) field-building studies that address a substantive area of interest in one or more portfolios; 2) rigorous evaluations of our Direct Impact grantees; and 3) projects that leverage large-scale data to inform educational decision-making. Our updated strategy has been informed by what we’re seeing across the education landscape and learning from our grantee partners. Below, we detail what this looks like.

Field-building research in priority investment areas

Our team aims to invest in research that builds knowledge focused on a broader set of questions and issues aligned with one or more portfolio strategies. In 2025, these focus areas are:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) in education: Examining the development, efficacy, and use of different types of genAI-enabled education tools for expanding capabilities and making products and programs more effective and cost-efficient;
• Student engagement and attendance: Identifying the causal drivers of student engagement and attendance in Pre-K through ninth grade settings, and testing the impact of interventions that aim to improve students’ engagement and positive experiences in school;
• Program implementation and dosage: Determining the barriers and facilitators to strong fidelity of implementation at scale, identifying strategies associated with achieving target dosage of a program or product at scale, and exploring whether impacts of evidence-based programs vary by fidelity of implementation and dosage;
• Instructional coherence: Determining the value-add of implementing aligned core and supplemental high-quality instructional materials, professional learning, and assessments for boosting student achievement across kindergarten through ninth grade; and
• Out-of-school time (OST) quality and impact: Understanding the causal impact of access to high-quality OST STEM experiences in kindergarten through ninth grade, and testing the cumulative impact of exposure to high-quality OST STEM programming on student outcomes over time.

We plan to fund 10-12 field-building research projects this year. In doing so, we will consider a broad range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, prioritizing potential impact and projects that include: a clear set of testable research questions, an appropriate and rigorous design for answering questions, a feasible plan for collecting and analyzing data, and a strong dissemination plan targeting key audiences in the field.

Validation studies for Direct Impact grantees

Our Foundation continues to believe that evidence is a necessary and often overlooked factor for scale, which is why we prioritize validating the program models of promising Direct Impact grantees and helping them disseminate their findings. We approach program validations by funding high-quality, external evaluations designed to help organizations better understand and improve the impact of their programs, as well as potentially gain access to additional funding streams. We prioritize funding validations that are set up to help grantees measurably improve their evidence base, for example by using a design that would make them eligible for a higher ESSA tier or by determining whether earlier impact findings replicate in a new setting or with a different population.

In 2025, our team plans to fund eight to 10 external evaluation studies that help us better understand how well our Direct Impact grantees’ models work, for whom, and under what circumstances. We will prioritize funding external evaluations that use a rigorous, quantitative design, are well-powered to answer confirmatory research questions, use reliable and valid data to target outcomes, follow a pre-registered analysis plan when estimating effects, and commit to disseminating findings transparently and accurately, regardless of the results. Further, we are committed to funding research that disaggregates data by demographic subgroups so that we can truly understand whether investments are having positive impacts on the students most in need of targeted supports.

Large-scale data to inform educational decision-making

We know rigorous research and high-quality data access go hand in hand. To produce actionable evidence, nonprofits and researchers need access to robust education datasets as well as platforms that contextualize findings for target audiences including districts, schools, and families. Our Data for Action portfolio seeks to increase education data availability, integration, and utility to generate and utilize evidence for field-wide decision-making.

In the year ahead, the portfolio aims to:

• Increase access to new and existing data that can be leveraged to generate research and inform action;
• Leverage big data, innovative methods, and AI to produce novel research; and
• Develop resources that inform educators and families based on evidence of impact and cost-effectiveness.

Looking ahead, together

As we continue to track learning recovery in a post-ESSER era, it is more important than ever to ensure that available public and private funds are spent on programs and services that are truly able to improve outcomes like kindergarten readiness, teacher quality, interest and engagement, and academic achievement. Our continued investments in evidence aim to provide the data needed to deliver on this goal. Along the way, we will continue to transparently share research findings in our newsletter and Research Repository.

If you’re interested in proposing research and evidence-building plans that align with one of our priority areas, please submit a one-page letter of interest or concept paper at: research@overdeck.org. We look forward to hearing from you!

Header image courtesy of Arizona State University