Publications

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.

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.

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.

How do schools encourage students to write more and teachers to offer more comments on student writing? How can schools use technology more effectively to support this shift in instruction? What makes achieving both of these goals difficult? The Drive to Write program tackles these challenges.

Although decisions about whether to expand a program are generally made after it has been tested, the early stages of evidence-building can lay the groundwork for the scale-up process down the road. The Implementation Research Incubator outlines some of the relevant questions.

In this commentary from the final report on the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project, Marianne Bertrand talks about the potential for a broader behavioral agenda that would include larger contributions from psychology and could transform public policy in ways that might induce long-term changes in behavior.

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project launched interventions in Indiana and Oklahoma aimed at increasing the number of parents who selected child care providers with state quality ratings, improving the child care subsidy renewal process, and increasing the number of parents who renew on time.

The NYC Change Capital Fund is a formal consortium of donors investing in community organizations with the dual objective of helping build their data capacity and encouraging ambitious program goals. This brief offers insights on the effective operation of a donor collaborative, from managing democratic governance to setting clear expectations.

This commentary focuses on an intervention from the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project that aimed to improve child support payment rates in a state-supervised program in Ohio. The author reflects on the availability of the agency’s data, the involvement of staff at all levels, clients’ experiences, and lessons learned.

Executive skills are the cognitive abilities that make it possible for people to set goals, regulate impulses, and complete the steps necessary to achieve their objectives. This paper describes a pilot of a coaching strategy based on executive skills conducted with three programs serving young people.

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.

Philip Oreopoulos’s commentary from the final report on the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project addresses the limitations of written communication and describes the value of personal interactions for building trusting relationships between service providers and clients, which in turn encourage active program participation.

Dilip Soman looks at the pros and cons of using heuristics in general and the “SIMPLER” framework in particular ― developed specifically by the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project ― to guide practitioners in their efforts to improve human services programs.