Browsing by Subject "Impact evaluation"

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Evaluating service supply in conditional cash transfers
(2015-05) Sabat Pereyra, Nadia Melina; Heinrich, Carolyn J.; Linden, Leigh L., 1975-
Conditional cash transfers are poverty reduction mechanisms that seek to increase demand of social services by combining an income effect with a health or education requirement. This demand-side strategy relies on a tacit assumption about the quality of and access to those services as a path to improve human capital outcomes. Some conditional cash transfers have included supply-side complementary incentives to ensure that services are suitable to deliver a good education and better health. This study reviews the existing evidence on the impact of supply-side incentives in the context of conditional cash transfers. The review finds that a limited number of studies estimate effects of supply in human capital outcomes and only a few impact evaluations consider the role of schools or health centers in enabling access. The evaluations revised find no evidence that supply side interventions coupled with conditional cash transfers directly improve program outcomes. Nonetheless, several studies highlight the relevance of school organization, in terms of school modalities and student/teacher ratios in school enrollment and attendance. Impact estimations as well as the implementation of the supply-side programs also signal the need for a more nuanced understanding of how school management influences a variety of schooling outcomes. In general, the small number of impact estimations and the restricted set of variables used limits the generalizability of the results. For this reason, a principal conclusion of the review is the need for further research on the topic, as well as consistency across impact measures and a more in-depth analysis of school supply and their influence on learning outcomes.
Randomized controlled trials to evaluate impact : their challenges and policy implications for medicine, education, and international development
(2012-12) Kahlert, Rahel C.; Ward, Peter M., 1951-; Treisman, Uri; Galbraith, James; Osborne, Cynthia; Roberts, Bryan
Policy makers in education and international development have lately gravitated toward the randomized controlled trial (RCT)—an evaluation design that randomly assigns a sample of people or households into an intervention group and a control group in order to measure the differential effect of the intervention—as a means to determine program impact. As part of federal regulations, the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International development explicitly declared a preference for the RCT. When advocating for adopting the RCT model as the preferred evaluation tool, policy makers point to the success story of medical trials and how they revolutionized medicine from Medieval charlatanry to a modern life-saving discipline. By presenting a more nuanced account of the role of the RCT in medical history, however, this study finds that landmark RCTs were accompanied with challenges, Evidence-Based Medicine had rightful critics, and opportunistic biases in drug trials apply equally to education policy and international development. This study also examines the recent privileged role of the RCT in education and international development, concluding that its initial promise was not entirely born out when put into practice, as the national Reading First Initiative exemplifies. From a comparative perspective, the RCT movements also encountered major RCT critics, whose voices were not initially heard. These voices, however, seem to have contributed to a swing of the pendulum away from RCT primacy back towards greater methodological pluralism. A major conclusion of this study is that policy makers should exercise great caution when using RCTs as a policy evaluation tool. This conclusion is arrived at via considering RCT biases, challenges, and limited generalizability; understanding its interpretive-qualitative components; and broadening the overall methodological repertoire to better enable evaluations of macro-policy interventions.