U.S. History Through Young People's Eyes: Evaluating the Impact of Mission US on Student Learning

60 schools (public, private and charter) in 25 states randomly assigned; 1,305 students in Grades 8-10

US students in Grades 8-10 in social studies, US history, AP US history and civics courses

An IES-funded, school-randomised national efficacy trial of Mission US - free interactive role-playing history games bundled with a document-analysis curriculum (three in-class discussions and THREE DOCUMENT ANALYSIS TASKS per game, plus decision trackers). Sixty schools drawn from 25 states were randomly assigned to use two Mission US games and their curricular materials or to continue business as usual covering the same content. Teachers had never used Mission US and received a one-hour professional learning session, a dashboard, and curriculum guides. Outcomes were students' knowledge of US history 1900-1950, their ABILITY TO ANALYSE HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS, and interest in history. This is the largest and most externally valid randomised test in this cluster of a document-analysis-bearing history intervention, and the only one where the developer team could not select the teachers. Two caveats: EDC has a long-standing research relationship with Mission US (it ran the earlier favourable quasi-experimental studies), so independence is developer-involved rather than independent; and the counterfactual was unusually strong - 78% of business-as-usual classrooms used some other digital game or supplemental material, meaning the trial largely compared one supplement against another rather than against nothing. The publicly posted research summary reports the design and the null but not the numeric impact estimates or standard errors.

Null. "On average, this study did not detect significant differences in student outcomes between Mission US classrooms and business-as-usual classrooms", including on the document-analysis outcome, although students in BOTH arms gained historical content knowledge over the period. Exploratory analyses suggested some schools benefited, which the authors correctly flag as hypothesis-generating rather than a finding. Teacher perceptions ran the opposite way to the achievement data: significantly more Mission US teachers agreed they were better able to teach the content and to build historical perspective-taking and historical empathy, and they reported higher student engagement - a clean repeat of the pattern in the EEF Grammar for Writing trial, where practitioner enthusiasm carried no information about effect. The team's own diagnosis of the null lists small sample, sample heterogeneity, and varied pedagogy "or because there truly is no impact over and above business-as-usual". Implementation was not the problem: 72% of teachers reported students played both games in full, and classes completed on average 11 of the 14 associated activities.

Low. Randomisation at school level across a national sample equates genetic and family-background distributions between arms in expectation, and the outcome is a null in any case.

not-applicable as a replication target, but decisive as context - EDC's own earlier Mission US studies (a 2016 quasi-experiment reporting a 15% pre-post knowledge gain versus under 1% for comparison, and a 2011 two-year comparison-group study of 1,118 middle schoolers reporting better history knowledge and document analysis) were positive, and the randomised national trial that followed them found nothing. That is the efficacy-to-effectiveness decay curve running inside a single programme's own evidence base.