CIMA Evidence: Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses in Education

By Education Division (VPS/SCL/EDU)

CIMA Evidence brings together what systematic reviews and meta-analyses have found about what works in education, compiled by the Education Division of the Inter-American Development Bank for its CIMA education information platform. It organizes published findings so that a policymaker can see, for a given intervention and a given outcome, how much evidence exists and how strong it is.

What the data covers

Five program areas are included: violence against girls, behavioral school-based violence prevention, school-based foundational literacy programs, school-based mathematics programs, and school-based tutoring programs. These fall under two strands, XXI Century Skills, Well-Being and School Climate, and Quality Education. Each intervention is classified along dimensions such as education strategy, instruction modality, school level and intervention duration, and each result is tied to a measured outcome. The underlying studies were published between 2004 and 2026 and were carried out in more than 60 countries across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania; the great majority appeared from 2014 onward.

What it contains

Four tables. Evidence Maps pairs interventions with the outcomes they were measured against and reports the number of studies behind each pairing, the rigor of that evidence and the pooled standardized mean difference. Evidence Gap Maps counts the studies available at low, medium and high confidence for each intervention-outcome pair, which is what exposes where no synthesis yet exists. The Heatmap gives the number of studies per topic and country. Citations lists the underlying papers with their DOIs. Category labels are carried in English, Spanish and Portuguese throughout.

How the data was collected

This is a secondary synthesis and contains no new fieldwork. Results were extracted from published systematic reviews, meta-analyses and the primary studies they cover, then coded into a common structure of topics, groupings, outcomes and dimensions so that findings from different literatures can be compared side by side.

Intended uses

Education ministries and IDB teams use it to check whether an intervention they are considering has already been evaluated, and with what result, before designing a program. Researchers use the gap maps to locate outcomes that no review has yet addressed, and the citation list as an entry point into the primary literature.

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Metadata & use

Identifier https://doi.org/10.60966/3s86s71h
License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Citation

Inter-American Development Bank (2026). CIMA Evidence: Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses in Education. IDB Open Data. https://doi.org/10.60966/3s86s71h

Published date 2026-08-31
Modified date 2026-08-31
Tags/Keywords Education · Systematic review · Meta-analysis · Evidence gap map · School-based interventions · Literacy and numeracy · Tutoring · Gender-based violence
Language
  1. English
Temporal coverage 2004-2026
Country
Argentina
Australia
Belgium
Bangladesh
Brazil
Barbados
Canada
Switzerland
Chile
China
Colombia
Costa Rica
Germany
Denmark
Spain
Ethiopia
Finland
United Kingdom
Greece
Guatemala
Haiti
Indonesia
India
Ireland
Iran
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Kenya
South Korea
Lebanon
Libya
Luxembourg
Mexico
Malawi
Niger
Netherlands
Norway
Nepal
Pakistan
Panama
Peru
Philippines
Paraguay
Singapore
El Salvador
Sweden
Thailand
Türkiye
Taiwan
Tanzania
Uganda
United States
Vietnam
Kosovo
South Africa
Zambia
Zimbabwe
Region Latin America and the Caribbean
Publisher
Inter-American Development Bank
Author
Inter-American Development Bank
Data collection type Observational Data
Statistical type Cross-sectional Data
Data structure Structured Data
Data notes

What is this dataset?

CIMA Evidence brings together the findings of systematic reviews and meta-analyses on education interventions, compiled by the Education Division of the Inter-American Development Bank. It publishes no new fieldwork of its own: it codes results that have already been synthesized in the academic literature into a single comparable structure, so the evidence behind a given intervention and a given outcome can be found in one place. Effect sizes are those reported by the underlying reviews, and the absence of evidence for an intervention-outcome pair means no qualifying study was found for it.

What topics does it cover?

Five program areas, grouped into two strands. Under XXI Century Skills, Well-Being and School Climate: violence against girls, and behavioral school-based violence prevention. Under Quality Education: school-based foundational literacy programs, school-based mathematics programs, and school-based tutoring programs.

What does this dataset contain?

Four tables. Evidence Maps pairs interventions with the outcomes they were measured against and reports the number of studies, the rigor of the evidence and the pooled standardized mean difference. Evidence Gap Maps counts the studies available at low, medium and high confidence for each intervention-outcome pair. The Heatmap reports the number of studies per topic and country. Citations lists the underlying papers with their DOIs. A data dictionary workbook describing every column accompanies them.

Which countries are covered by this dataset?

The evidence comes from studies conducted in more than 60 countries across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Latin American and Caribbean countries represented include Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Jamaica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru. The global reach is deliberate: the platform serves Latin American and Caribbean policymakers, but it draws on the best available evidence wherever it was produced.

What time period does this dataset cover?

The underlying studies were published between 2004 and 2026. The large majority date from 2014 onward, reflecting how much systematic review activity in education has grown over the last decade; a small number of earlier foundational studies are retained where a review relied on them.

How was this data collected?

Results were extracted from published systematic reviews, meta-analyses and the primary studies they cover, then coded into a shared vocabulary of topics, groupings, subgroupings, outcomes and dimensions. The Evidence Maps and Evidence Gap Maps tables are stored in long format: their metric columns are collapsed into a "variable" column naming the measure and a "value" column holding it.

How can this dataset be used?

Education ministries and project teams can check whether an intervention they are considering has been evaluated and what the pooled effect was, before committing to a design. Researchers can use the gap maps to identify outcomes that no review has yet addressed, and the citation table as an entry point into the primary literature. Analysts can filter by topic, grouping and outcome to reproduce the views published on the CIMA platform.

In what format is this dataset available?

Four tables published to the IDB DataStore, browsable and filterable in the portal and downloadable as CSV, plus the data dictionary as an Excel workbook.

Under what license is this dataset published?

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt the data, including for commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate credit.

How do I cite this dataset?

Inter-American Development Bank (2026). CIMA Evidence: Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses in Education. IDB Open Data.

Dataset files

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