Publications

This toolkit offers state Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) agencies a systematic approach—with accompanying examples and worksheets—for employing human-centered design and behavioral science to address problems that may be limiting engagement and participation in SNAP Employment and Training programs.

This interactive guide and the accompanying, full toolkit provide practitioners with user-friendly, hands-on resources to support the implementation of new program components or services. Each step has at least one accompanying template or tool that was used to implement new services as part of the Building Bridges and Bonds study.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed inequities in access to and success in career and technical education (CTE). This post summarizes a discussion among teachers and program coordinators about what has changed a year into remote instruction, and about how to make CTE programs more equitable now and when in-person instruction returns.

This report from Westat and MDRC focuses on the implementation and short-term impacts of TechHire and the Strengthening Working Families Initiative, two programs that make training in high-demand industries more accessible to individuals who experience barriers to training and employment.

This brief summarizes the evidence from studies of multifaceted support programs aimed at boosting college graduation rates. It examines what works and the state and institutional factors necessary for successful implementation, and offers advice on how to balance fidelity with local needs while measuring and ensuring positive impacts.

In this commentary, originally published in District Administration, MDRC’s Michelle Maier and Shira Mattera offer evidenced-backed advice for policymakers and practitioners about how to invest new federal funds to enhance the quality of preschool programs.

When a parent is jailed or incarcerated, it has direct consequences for children and families. Family-strengthening programs seek to maintain healthy relationships between such parents and their children. They have the potential to reduce the harmful effects of incarceration on families. This brief describes six recommendations for family-strengthening programs.

In this commentary, originally published by The Hechinger Report, MDRC’s Alex Mayer and Catherine Brown from The Institute for College Access & Success explain how research shows that investing in comprehensive student support programs can increase college graduation rates.

The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) project integrates procedural justice (the idea of fairness in processes) into enforcement at six child support agencies. This brief describes the delivery of PJAC services from PJAC case managers’ perspectives.

In April 2020, the Center for Employment Opportunities launched the Returning Citizens Stimulus (RCS), a cash transfer program that offered financial support to people released from prison or jail. The findings in this report suggest that RCS may provide a promising model for smoothing reentry from incarceration.

This report presents findings from a random assignment evaluation of a program incorporating interactive cognitive-behavioral techniques with job-readiness services for fathers recently involved in the justice system. As implemented in this evaluation, the program did not produce impacts on employment, involvement in the criminal justice system, or parenting.

The Just Beginning intervention aims to improve the quality of interactions between fathers with low incomes and their young children. Fathers participated in up to five sessions with their young children. This paper uses growth curve models to estimate patterns of change across the five sessions.

The Just Beginning intervention aims to improve the quality of interactions between fathers with low incomes and their young children. As implemented in this evaluation, the intervention did not produce statistically significant effects on measures of father-child relationship quality, on fathers’ parenting confidence, nor on levels of father-child contact.

The Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) study tested innovative, interactive, skill-building approaches to address parenting and economic stability in the context of existing fatherhood programs. This brief highlights findings from the three tests and summarizes lessons from the B3 study experience common to all the tested interventions.

This report describes a randomized field trial of an app designed to be integrated into a fatherhood curriculum. The app offered reminders, planning tools, and encouragement to participants. The study found no evidence that the app improved attendance, either for the first session or overall.

With the onset of the pandemic, MDRC implementation researchers halted travel to programs and transitioned their work to virtual modes. This blog post offers reflections on adaptations they made that are worth continuing post-pandemic and on the in-person practices they look forward to resuming.

Evaluations of many social programs have not had access to the resources needed for measuring their long-term outcomes. This guide was developed to help researchers assess the feasibility and potential value of using administrative data to examine long-term program outcomes and describes steps for linking those data with evaluation data.

Many programs and agencies collect data about their clients and service use but they may not have the time and resources to use those data to inform their decision making. This post shares some simple approaches for how to use data to improve programs.

In this commentary, originally published in The Hill, MDRC’s Alyssa Ratledge highlights the value of postsecondary institutions in rural communities and describes innovations that rural colleges have developed during the pandemic that could be expanded with more support.

This brief summarizes results from an assessment of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs in 54 U.S. states and territories and their ability to analyze data used for program improvement, monitoring, and evidence building. The assessment provides a foundation for technical assistance and continued improvement for the TANF program.