Publications

Multisite randomized trials allow researchers to study both the average impact of an intervention and how the impact varies across settings, which can help guide decisions in policy, practice, and science. This Reflections on Methodology post distills some key considerations for research design and for reporting and interpreting such variation.

Career pathways programs, which equip high school students with the academic, technical, and “soft” skills they need to succeed, can also help meet local employer demand for skilled workers. This issue focus introduces one such initiative that uses paid internships to help students gain a foothold in a high-wage industry.

Small-group math clubs in kindergarten are an innovative way to align children’s elementary and pre-K math experiences. In a demonstration of the High 5s kindergarten supplement aligned with the principles of an evidence-based, developmentally appropriate pre-K curriculum, attendance and engagement were high, and children participated in hands-on, individualized activities.

The Implementation Research Incubator discusses an innovative approach to pre-K math, in which the researchers used qualitative methods to put the critical elements of a program’s theory of change under a microscope. Their insights may help future adopters of the model better understand these key components.

Implemented in eight secondary schools and a local college, this program was designed to build students’ college preparedness by training instructors in shared teaching strategies and best practices, strengthening academic rigor in the classroom, and promoting collaboration and consistency in teaching and study strategies across grades and schools.

This project tested whether high-quality, aligned math instruction, via an evidence-based curriculum in pre-K and innovative math clubs in kindergarten, could improve children’s outcomes. The effect of two years of enriched math translates into closing more than a quarter of the achievement gap between low-income children and their higher-income peers.

Social network analysis models the structure of relationships using “nodes” (such as organizations) and “edges” (or ties, such as contracts). This Reflections on Methodology post highlights what the method can analyze — strength and complexity of connections, an organization’s positional power — in the context of a community development study in Chicago.

This compendium of written materials comes from the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project. The collection illustrates how specific concepts from behavioral science were used in different settings and formats by practitioners and program designers in child care, child support, and work-support programs.

Most community college students enroll in fewer than 15 credits per semester, making it nearly impossible for them to graduate in two years. Many also struggle academically. This infographic describes how the Finish Line project will attempt to use behavioral science to address these issues and thereby improve graduation rates.

This feature explores comprehensiveness in community development partnerships in Chicago neighborhoods, and shows how comprehensiveness can help neighborhoods work together to build needed affordable housing and improve schools.

An essential step in the child support process is delivering legal documents to the person named as a parent. This intervention in Georgia applied insights from behavioral science to get more parents to come in and accept documents voluntarily instead of using a sheriff or process server to deliver them.

On February 6, Alex Mayer, MDRC’s Deputy Director of Postsecondary Education, explained to members of two California State Assembly committees that combining and integrating evidence-based strategies to address multiple factors can be highly effective in improving completion rates among low-income college students.

In an effort to help students whose academic careers stall in remedial courses, community colleges are addressing both their approaches to placement and their traditional course structure. The use of multiple measures to assess college readiness is increasing, and several instructional reforms are gaining traction.

Identifying and spreading effective policies and programs involves a cycle of implementation, adaptation, and evidence-building. Implementation research plays a central role in understanding and improving interventions at each stage of the cycle.

The proliferation of school choice systems offers researchers opportunities to study the effects of education reforms on a large scale, rigorously but relatively quickly. In the first of two posts on the subject, Reflections on Methodology discusses how to ensure that a school assignment process is truly random.

In this commentary from the final report on the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, Sim B. Sitkin considers looking beyond individual client behavior when designing interventions to target program staff and groups of clients as well as entire organizations.

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project launched an intervention in California to engage families in a welfare-to-work program and another intervention in New York to encourage low-income single adults without dependent children to attend a meeting about an earnings supplement program intended to provide an incentive to work.

An important tenet of building reliable evidence is that study findings can be both reproduced and replicated and that the methods and data used stand up under scrutiny. This post in the Reflections on Methodology series outlines several ways to ensure credibility in research design and practice.

This issue focus discusses the conclusions of a recent MDRC working paper, Project-Based Learning: A Literature Review. The paper found that project-based learning holds promise for improving students’ outcomes but that much remains to be learned about its effectiveness and about how its implementation can be strengthened.

This working paper (forthcoming in July 2018 as a chapter in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science) updates the existing pipeline paradigm for evidence building with a cyclical paradigm that encompasses evidence building, implementation, and adaptation.