ABSTRACT
Acknowledging that there are still significant gaps in the Global South ‘what works best’ for education improvement research, in this chapter we suggest leveraging wider sources of data. We introduce the Visible Learning METAX as a potential ‘stop-gap’. The METAX is (to our knowledge) the largest global ‘what works’ database in the world, synthesizing the findings from more than 1,700 meta-analyses of more than 100,000 studies, involving more than 300 million students. However, these data are predominantly from the Global North, so great care is required in the interpretation and application. Therefore, we explore where the METAX data comes from, how it was aggregated, the methodological health warnings, and the use contexts where we have most confidence about its relevance to educational improvement.
