Founded in 1974, MDRC is committed to improving the lives of people with low incomes. We design promising new interventions, evaluate existing programs, and provide technical assistance to build better programs.
MDRC develops evidence about solutions to some of the nation’s most difficult problems. Explore our projects and variety of products, including publications, videos, podcast episodes, and resources for researchers and practitioners.
Children’s and Adolescents’ Perceptions and Experiences of Poverty and Inequality
Poverty in childhood can affect health, social and behavioral functioning, and cognitive, academic, and educational outcomes. Yet little is known about how children view their experiences of poverty. This brief summarizes findings from interviews with children and adolescents about their perceptions of wealth, economic inequality, and their own poverty experiences.
Homeboy Industries Managed Its Organization-Wide Transition to a New Data System by Following Five Key Principles
Homeboy Industries’ (HBI) experience implementing a new data system was described in an earlier InPractice post. This post examines the complexities and challenges that must be addressed before successful implementation can take place, and how HBI managed that change process.
An Exploratory Study of Student Outcomes and Placement Practices
Informed self-placement (ISP) helps college students determine whether they are ready for entry-level college courses or need remedial education first. This brief explores the potential of ISP to improve students’ access to college-level courses and gives colleges an opportunity to consider placement-method changes that may boost student success.
The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) project integrated procedural justice (the idea of fairness in processes) into enforcement at six child support agencies. This report compares the service and enforcement experiences of parents randomly assigned to receive PJAC services with those of parents assigned to business as usual.
A Synthesis of Findings from the Paycheck Plus Demonstration
The Paycheck Plus Demonstration in New York and Atlanta offered an expanded after-tax bonus to low-income workers without dependent children, a population that benefits little from the current Earned Income Tax Credit. This brief presents impacts on employment, earnings, and income based on the pooled sample from both cities.
Many college students have difficulty meeting their basic needs for food, housing, childcare, and health care, which can interfere with their ability to concentrate on their studies, remain enrolled, and eventually graduate. This brief explores the interventions that can help students meet their basic needs and the emerging evidence behind these interventions.
A Brief Synthesis of 20 Years of MDRC’s Randomized Controlled Trials
What works to help community college students progress academically? This brief synthesizes 20 years of rigorous research by MDRC, presenting new evidence about key attributes of community college interventions that are positively related to larger impacts on students’ academic progress.
Practices, Justifications, Outcomes, and Limitations
Many colleges are exploring alternative assessment models, such as informed self-placement (ISP), to increase student enrollment and success in entry-level college courses and to identify students who would benefit from developmental (remedial) instruction. This literature review provides a discussion of the methods used to implement ISP and justifications for its use.
Multiple testing procedures reduce the likelihood of false positive findings, but can also reduce the probability of detecting true effects. This post introduces two open-source software tools from the Power Under Multiplicity Project that can help researchers plan analyses for randomized controlled trials using multiple testing procedures.
Multiple measures assessment is a more reliable method than a single placement test to assess whether incoming students have the literacy and numeracy skills required for college-level courses. This brief summarizes the research on multiple measures assessment and offers recommendations for states interested in its implementation.
Three Steps for Assessing Benchmarks in All-Hands Meetings
How does your organization keep track of its progress toward meeting key performance benchmarks? In this edition of InPractice, we share a few tips on how to use staff meetings to make sure your team is staying on-target.
Research suggests that pretrial policy reforms supporting arrested individuals’ release pending trial—unless evidence shows they will not return to court or they pose a threat to public safety—have positive results. This post discusses several policies that were established to prevent the overuse of pretrial detention.
What We Know, Gaps in the Field, and Promising New Directions
Ensuring equitable access to high-quality pre-K requires being able to measure quality, particularly at a large scale. This brief describes existing, widely used measures of pre-K quality and their limitations, examines some of the newer measurement work being developed, and discusses future directions for the field.
Career pathways programs, which offer education and training in targeted industry sectors, have emerged as a strategy colleges can use to help people earn credentials and obtain jobs with family-sustaining wages. This brief offers recommendations drawn from rigorous research for how states and colleges can implement effective career pathways programs.
This brief presents results from a proof-of-concept exercise that examined the potential benefits of using predictive analytics to improve service delivery by Child First, a program that provides therapeutic support to families with young children. The information may be useful for other organizations interested in implementing these cutting-edge tools.
Incorporating the perspectives of early childhood educators is key to strengthening pre-K assessment systems. In this piece originally published by New America, Meghan McCormick offers insights from pre-K teachers about how to make assessments more equitable, relevant, and useful.
In this commentary originally published in The Hechinger Report, Meghan McCormick and JoAnn Hsueh explain how the surprising findings from a study of the Tennessee state-run, voluntary pre-k program highlight the need to collect better data so we can understand what really works.
A large proportion of students in public colleges are assigned to developmental education, which is intended to prepare them for college-level courses. However, research suggests that colleges’ typical developmental education policies may hinder students’ academic progress. Here are three recommendations for reforming developmental education based on a decade of research.
This is the fifth in a series of briefs highlighting strategies to increase educational equity by addressing students’ social and emotional needs. It describes strategies that school systems are using to increase students’ sense of school belonging and connectedness.
In this commentary originally published by Route Fifty, Jonathan Bigelow highlights the national challenge of finding landlords who will accept Housing Choice Vouchers. However, evidence from the Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) project in King County and Seattle offers lessons about what might help landlords say yes.
