2023
- In-home growth monitoring - A promising intervention leveraging community health workers to reduce childhood stunting:
Evidence from Pakistan, April 25, 2023 - Assessing learning remotely in impact evaluations: Lessons from SIEF’s COVID-19 Window, April 12, 2023
- Remote learning encouragement interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence on their effectiveness in alleviating learning loss from six low-income countries, February 22, 2023
2022
- Effectiveness and Cost-Effectiveness of Small-Quantity Lipid-Based Nutrient Supplements (SQ-LNS) for Preventing Child Malnutrition, Improving Child Survival and Promoting Healthy Development, May 4 and May 6, 2022
- Sugira Muryango Home-Visiting to Promote ECD and Prevent Violence: A Partnership in Rwanda, January 24, 2022
2021
- Using Adaptive Experiments in Policy Research, April 14, 2021
- Learning from nimble evaluations, February 11, 2021
2020
- The role of sampling and recruitment in improving the policy relevance of RCTs, December 10, 2020
- How much do our recommendations cost? Incorporating more careful costing into our analytics and operations in Education, November 18, 2020
- An adaptive experiment to improve quality in contraceptive counseling and increase the uptake of long-acting reversible contraceptive methods, July 21, 2020
2019
- How can psychometrics help impact evaluation? November 25, 2019
- Children’s Storybooks and Early Literacy Skills in Rural Kenya, October 28, 2019
- Effects of nutritional supplementation and home visiting on growth and development in young children: The Mahay study in Madagascar, October 8, 2019
- Recruitment, Effort, and Retention Effects of Performance Contracts for Civil Servants: Experimental Evidence from Rwandan Primary Schools, May 7, 2019
- Upping the Ante: The Equilibrium Effects of Unconditional Grants to Private Schools, March 26, 2019
- Sustainability of Early Childhood Education Services: Evidence from Rural Indonesia, March 6, 2019
- Improving last-mile service delivery using phone-based monitoring, February 14, 2019
- Developing Population Measures for Early Childhood, January 29, 2019
- Why Increasing Teacher Effort is Hard –and What to Do About it, January 24, 2019
- Cash and Change: Evaluation Results from Behavioral Interventions in the Madagascar Human Development Cash Transfer Program, January 23, 2019
2018
- Learning Fast: How Nimble Evaluations Can Help Improve Program Design, December 12, 2018
- The Impact of Early Childhood Education On Child Development in Rural India, December 12, 2018
- Leveraging Patients’ Social Networks to Overcome Tuberculosis Under-detection: A Field Experiment in India, November 28, 2018
- Early Childhood Development Interventions, October 18, 2018
- Can Preschool Help Minorities Make up Differences in Human Capital? Experimental Evidence from Bulgaria, June 12, 2018
- Looks great, but how much does it cost? How to capture and analyze costs, April 11, 2018
- Atomic moms: Using stable isotopes to measure the nutrition of children and mothers, April 10, 2018
- Increasing teacher’s intrinsic motivation, March 29, 2018
2017
- A Toolkit for Measuring Early Childhood Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries | Book Launch, December 13, 2017
- Combining supply- and demand side interventions to improve preschool attendance and school readiness | Evidence from Cambodia, November 21, 2017
- Testing and scaling-up supply- and demand-side interventions to improve kindergarten educational quality in Ghana, September 27, 2017
- Can Classroom Observation and Coaching Improve Teacher Performance? The Case of Brazil, July 13, 2017
- The Impact of the Mobile Pedagogical Tutors | Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in rural Mexico, July 12, 2017
- Cheap Talk or Real Change? CDD, CTTs and Nutrition: A Chance to Put Our Money Where our Mouth Is, June 21, 2017
- Nimble RCTs, May 23, 2017
2016
- Promoting Early Childhood Development Through Safety Nets in Africa: Opportunities and Challenges, September 27, 2016
- Combining Pre-School Quality Interventions with Parenting Education: A Cluster Randomized Trial, January 14, 2016
Seminar: Sugira Muryango Home-Visiting to Promote ECD and Prevent Violence: A Partnership in Rwanda
Opening Remarks: Laura B. Rawlings (World Bank)
Chair: Alaka Holla (World Bank)
Presenters: Theresa S. Betancourt (Research Program on Children and Adversity), Vincent Sezibera (University of Rwanda), Sarah Jensen (Research Program on Children and Adversity), Erik Simmons (Research Program on Children and Adversity)
Discussant: Aline Coudouel (World Bank)
Date: Monday, January 24, 10:00 – 11:00 AM EST
About: Sugira Muryango is a 12-week home-visiting intervention to promote early childhood development and prevent violence that uses active coaching by non-specialist home visitors. In the SIEF-supported cluster randomized trial in Rwanda, the intervention was integrated into the government social protection scheme and targeted families ranked at the most extreme level of poverty who had a child between 6-36 months of age. Community-based coaches visited families once a week for 12 weeks to provide male and female caregivers with play-based “active coaching” to enhance their interactions with their children, as well as coaching on responsive caregiving, nutrition, hygiene, emotion regulation and nonviolent interactions among household members. The evaluation found that the program had positive impacts: it led to improvements in children’s gross motor skills, communication and problem-solving skills, and social emotional development. Males became much more involved in childcare, females experienced less intimate partner violence and children experienced a reduction in violent disciplining. These findings indicate a potential for improving children’s development and the overall home environment by adding components on parenting, conflict resolution and non-violent discipline to existing social protection programs. The presentation will cover the development of Sugira Muryango, findings from the cluster-randomized trial, costing analyses, and a brief update on ongoing work to conduct long-term follow-up assessments of families and children served by the intervention while testing of implementation science strategies to further scale and extend the reach of the intervention.
Seminar: Using Adaptive Experiments in Policy Research
Presenter: Anja Sautmann (World Bank)
Discussants: Michael Trucano (World Bank)
Date: Wednesday, April 14, 2021, 10:00 – 11:00am EST
About: Randomized evaluations deliver a high standard of evidence when estimating the impact of a specific intervention. However, they can be time consuming and require large samples, and they are not always well suited to research objectives such as choosing one out of a larger set of interventions, or balancing participant welfare with statistical rigor. Adaptive experiments can address some of these issues. They are carried out in waves, and adjust the assignment of participants to treatment arms flexibly in each wave, accounting for what was already learned in prior rounds, as well as what the specific learning goal of the experiment is. As a result, compared with a standard impact evaluation, an adaptive experiment could for example be carried out with fewer participants, and assign more participants to the most successful treatment arms.
Materials: Video Recording, Presentation
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Seminar: Learning from nimble evaluations
Chair: Halsey Rogers (World Bank)
Presenters: Karthik Muralidharan (University of California, San Diego), Adanna Deborah Ugochi Chukwuma (World Bank), David McKenzie (World Bank), Alaka Holla (World Bank)
Discussants: Lena Nanushyan (First Deputy Minister of Health, Republic of Armenia), Jaime Saavedra (World Bank), Joan Lombardi (Georgetown University)
Date: Thursday, February 11, 2021, 9:30 – 11:00 AM EST
About: In March 2018, the Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) published a competitive call for proposals on nimble evaluations, or rapid, low-cost evaluations meant to generate experimental evidence on the implementation of programs and policies in low- and middle-income countries and to spur innovations in the use of administrative and program-generated data for impact evaluation. SIEF intended to develop a portfolio of evaluations that could generate valuable experimental evidence throughout the project cycle, not just at project closure, and to shift focus from final impact to implementation-focused outcomes such as the take-up and delivery of services. This was an innovative type of evaluation for SIEF and for all funders of evidence, and at the time of the call, little was known about what kind of evaluation designs and contexts would best promote “nimble-ness”, or the ability to generate and use rigorous evidence quickly.
In this event, researchers present results from their nimble evaluations, the SIEF program manager presents what can be learned from a review of the entire nimble portfolio, and a panel of practitioners discusses the role of this type of evidence in the policy cycle.
Materials: Karthik Muralidharan’s presentation and paper, Adanna Deborah Ugochi Chukwuma’s presentation, David McKenzie’s presentation, Alaka Holla's presentation, Video Recording
Chair: Alaka Holla (World Bank)
Presenter: Elizabeth Tipton (Northwestern University)
Discussant: Berk Özler (World Bank)
Date: Thursday, December 10, 10:00 - 11:30 AM
About: Field experiments are now common in education, development, and the social sciences. Generalizing from the results of a field experiment to a policy relevant population, however, is difficult when the effect of the intervention varies across people and institutions. As a result, statisticians are increasingly interested in the development of methods for generalizing treatment effects, as well as testing moderators of treatment impacts. Yet much of this methodological development has focused on analytic approaches, neglecting the role that the sample itself plays in these analyses. This is particularly important given that nearly all field experiments are conducted in samples of convenience. In this talk, a practical approach to recruitment and sample selection is introduced that is population focused and easily implementable when population data is available. This sample selection approach is the extended to include optimal designs for estimation of treatment effect moderators. Throughout the talk, examples from education and psychology experiments will be included.
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Seminar: Children’s Storybooks and Early Literacy Skills in Rural Kenya
Presenters: Pamela Jakiela (Center for Global Development), Owen Ozier (World Bank)
Date: Monday, October 28, 2019
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: We conduct a cluster-randomized evaluation of an early literacy intervention that provided Kenyan parents with illustrated children’s storybooks and modified dialogic reading training. Rural communities were randomly assigned to treatment or control. Within treatment communities, households were further randomized to receive children’s storybooks in either Luo (the mother tongue of all children in the sample) or English (a national language, and the primary language of instruction in upper primary school). The endline survey is now in the field.
In this presentation, we will discuss findings from a short-term pilot study and the pre-analysis plan for the ongoing cluster-randomized trial. We will report on the implementation data we gathered as we scaled the study from the short-term pilot to the ongoing larger-scale trial, ensuring implementation fidelity at each stage. We provide a template that others may find useful in preparation for large-scale randomized trials.
Materials: Presentation, SIEF webpage, Video Recording
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Presenters: Andrew Zeitlin (Georgetown University), Owen Ozier (World Bank)
Date: Tuesday, May 7, 2019
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: Evidence suggests that pay-for-performance contracts can cause civil servants to put more effort into their work, but less is known about the effect of these contracts on who chooses to enter the public sector. We provide the first experimental evidence of the impact of pay-for-performance on both. In partnership with the Government of Rwanda, we implemented a `pay-for-percentile' scheme (a specific version of pay-for-performance) in a two-tier experimental design. In the first tier, we randomly assigned teacher labor markets to either a pay-for-performance or equivalent fixed-wage contracts. In the second tier, we implemented a `surprise', school-level re-randomization, allowing us to separately identify the effects of advertised pay-for-performance contracts on the composition of the workforce and on the effort exerted by those in the workforce. We find that pay-for-performance contracts changed the composition of the teaching workforce, drawing in individuals who were more money-oriented, as measured by a framed Dictator Game. But these recruits were not less effective teachers--if anything the reverse.
Seminar: Upping the Ante: The Equilibrium Effects of Unconditional Grants to Private Schools
Presenter: Jishnu Das (World Bank)
Date: Tuesday, March 26, 2019
Location: World Bank G Building, Washington, DC
About: This paper tests for financial constraints as a market failure in education in a low-income country. In an experimental setup, unconditional cash grants are allocated to one private school or all private schools in a village. Enrollment increases in both treatments, accompanied by infrastructure investments. However, test scores and fees only increase in the setting of all private schools along with higher teacher wages. This differential impact follows from a canonical oligopoly model with capacity constraints and endogenous quality: greater financial saturation crowds-in quality investments. The findings of higher social surplus in the setting of all private schools, but greater private returns in the setting of one private school underscore the importance of leveraging market structure in designing educational subsidies.
Materials: Paper, Presentation, SIEF webpage, Video Recording
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Seminar: Sustainability of Early Childhood Education Services: Evidence from Rural Indonesia
Presenters: Amer Hasan (World Bank), Nozomi Nakajima (Harvard University)
Chair: Toby Linden (World Bank)
Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2019
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: Researchers and practitioners alike are increasingly concerned about the sustainability of services established using donor funding. In this paper, we document the sustainability of early childhood education centers established under a large-scale donor-funded project in Indonesia. First, we show that the majority of centers continued to provide preschool services after the donor-funding ended. Second, we explore key predictors of center sustainability, such as center financing, classroom quality, local market conditions, supplementary services, and community support. Our results point to actionable lessons that can be taken into account when considering the design and sustainability of future preschool projects.
Materials: Amer Hasan’s presentation, Nozomi Nakajima’s presentation, SIEF webpage, Evidence to Policy note, Video Recording
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Seminar: Improving last-mile service delivery using phone-based monitoring
Presenters: Jeff Weaver (University of Southern California)
Chair: Alaka Holla (World Bank)
Date: Thursday, February 14, 2019
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washinngton, DC
About: Improving “last-mile” public service delivery is a recurring challenge in developing countries. Could the widespread adoption of mobile phones provide a simple, cost-effective means for improvement? Researchers used an at-scale experiment to evaluate the impact of a phone-based monitoring system on a program that transferred nearly a billion dollars to 5.7 million Indian farmers. In selected jurisdictions, officials were informed that program implementation would be measured via calls with beneficiaries. This led to a 3.9% increase in farmers receiving transfers on time, and a 1.5% increase overall. The program was highly cost-effective, costing 3.6 cents for each additional dollar delivered.
Materials: Presentation, Paper, Evidence to Policy note, Video Recording
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Seminar: Developing Population Measures for Early Childhood
Presenters: Tarun Dua (WHO), Claudia Cappa (UNICEF)
Introduction: Amanda Devercelli (World Bank), Alaka Holla (World Bank)
Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2019
Location: World Bank I Building, Washington, DC
About: Ensuring that by 2030 all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care, and pre-primary education so that they are ready for school is one of key parts of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To measure success – both in terms of the SDGs and in terms of World Bank projects focused on the early years -- we need to be able to monitor whether children are developmentally on track in health, learning, and psychosocial well-being. But how can we validly measure whether children are developmentally on-track at a population level? Officials from the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF, which are leading efforts to develop population measures that can be used for global monitoring of children’s access to early years programs and support, discussed their work in this field.
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Seminar: Why increasing teacher effort is hard –and what to do about it
Presenters: Shwetlena Sabarwal (World Bank)
Chair: Luis Benveniste (World Bank)
Date: Thursday, January 24, 2019
Location: World Bank G Building, Washington, DC
About: Teachers in developing countries spend too little time teaching. Tackling this has been an important focus of our projects, interventions, and impact evaluations. Yet, very few show any impact, and almost none show strong impacts. Why is it so difficult to increase teacher effort? Why don’t teachers respond to training, incentives, or accountability interventions to increase the time spent teaching?
Materials: Paper, SIEF webpage
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Seminar: Cash and Change: Evaluation Results from Behavioral Interventions in the Madagascar Human Development Cash Transfer Program
Presenters: Laura B. Rawlings (World Bank), Saugato Datta (ideas42), Josh Martin (ideas42)
Chair: Renos Vakis (World Bank)
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Location: World Bank J Building, Washington, DC
About: Cash transfer programs have historically aimed at addressing short term poverty through income support and long-term poverty by encouraging households’ investments in human capital and productive invest, especially of children. This focus on behavior and human capital investments aimed at children’s development is a central feature of the Madagascar Human Development Cash Transfer (HDCT) program.
Materials: SIEF webpage
Seminar: Learning Fast: How Nimble Evaluations Can Help Improve Program Design
Presenters: Melissa Adelman (World Bank), Seema Jayachandran (Northwestern University), Berk Ozler (World Bank)
Chair: Roberta Gatti, Chief Economist of Human Development, World Bank
Date: Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Location: World Bank J Building, Washington, DC
About: The Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund recently selected 18 evaluations for funding through its fourth call for proposals, focused on nimble evaluations – rapid, low-cost evaluations designed to provide insight on implementation or improve the use of administrative data for impact evaluations in low- and middle-income countries. Panelists discussed evaluations that focused on increasing student motivation and effort in the Dominican Republic, promoting infant-directed speech in Ghana, and the adoption of long-acting reversible contraceptives in Cameroon.
Materials: Video recording, Dominican Republic presentation, Ghana presentation, Cameroon presentation
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Seminar: The Impact of Early Childhood Education On Child Development in Rural India, December 12, 2018
Presenters: Seema Jayachandran, Professor of Economics, Northwestern University
Chair: Roberta Gatti, Chief Economist of Human Development, World Bank
Date: Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Location: World Bank J Building, Washington, DC
About: Primary school enrollment is now nearly universal in many developing countries, but children from poor families arrive less prepared than better-off peers who attended pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. Researchers studied the effects of expanding access to pre-K and kindergarten on child development in Karnataka, India, through a randomized evaluation and partnered with a private kindergarten provider to offer two-year scholarships to children from poor families.
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Seminar: Leveraging Patients’ Social Networks to Overcome Tuberculosis Under-detection: A Field Experiment in India
Presenters: Jessica Goldberg (University of Maryland), Mario Macis (Johns Hopkins), Pradeep Chintagunta (University of Chicago)
Date: Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: Peer referrals are a common strategy for addressing asymmetric information in contexts such as job search. They could be especially valuable for increasing testing and treatment of infectious diseases, where peers may have advantages over health workers in both identifying new patients and providing them credible information, but they are rare in that context. In an experiment with 3,182 patients of 128 tuberculosis (TB) treatment centers in India, we find that peers are indeed more effective than health workers in bringing in new suspects for testing, and that low-cost incentives of about $3.00 per referral considerably increase the probability that current patients make referrals resulting in new symptomatics being tested and new TB cases identified. Peer outreach identifies new TB cases at 25-35% of the cost of outreach by health workers, and can be a valuable tool in combatting infectious disease.
Materials: Paper, SIEF Webpage
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Seminar: Early Childhood Development Interventions
Presenters: Costas Meghir, Professor of Economics, Yale University
Date: October 18, 2018
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: There has been an increasing interest in ECD interventions as a means of breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty and of offering better opportunities to children born in deprived environments. But can the interventions be effective? How do parents react to these interventions? And what are the challenges of scaling up. In this paper we review the results from two ECD interventions, one in Colombia and one in India. We then describe a framework for understanding how these interventions work and present results in this respect from Colombia. We find important short run effects on cognition and language. We also find that the interventions operate by shifting the way mothers invest in their children, which seem to underlie the success of the interventions.
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Seminar: Can Preschool Help Minorities Make up Differences in Human Capital? Experimental Evidence from Bulgaria
Presenters: Joost de Laat (PhD), Professor of Economics, Centre for Global Challenges and the Utrecht School of Economics, Utrecht University
Chair: Alaka Holla, Program Manager, Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF)
Date: June 12, 2018
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: There is growing concern that children from disadvantaged families lag behind children from advantaged families because they do not participate as much in quality early childhood development opportunities. This seminar presented findings from a large scale 2x4 multi-arm randomized control trial implemented in 2014-2015 across 236 poor settlements across Bulgaria with the aim to improve full-day kindergarten participation of poor children, especially Roma, Europe’s largest ethnic minority.
Materials: Seminar Recording, Presentation, SIEF Webpage
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Seminar: Looks great, but how much does it cost? How to capture and analyze costs
Presenters: Sam Fishman, Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF)
Chair: Harry Patrinos, Manager, Education Global Practice
Discussant: Ciro Avitabile, Senior Economist, HD Practice Group
Date: April 11, 2018
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: Sam Fishman presented a summary of methodological and process guidance on cost collection and analysis. This included a review of 1) how research and operations can benefit from costing; 2) the components that make up useful cost data; 3) how to capture the appropriate costs and design a cost model and; 4) how to overcome the methodological and analytical challenges associated with costing. The presentation helped participants to gain a clear idea of what they can achieve by integrating costing plans into the projects, and how to go about planning and executing cost collection and analysis.
Materials: Seminar Recording, Presentation
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Seminar: Atomic moms: Using stable isotopes to measure the nutrition of children and mothers
Presenters: Cornelia Loechl, Section Head, Nutritional and Health-related Environmental Studies, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
Chair: Leslie K. Elder, Senior Nutrition Specialist, Health, Nutrition & Population Global Practice
Date: April 10, 2018
Location: World Bank G Building, Washington, DC
About: Cornelia Loechl presented on the IAEA’s program in nutrition, highlighting the contribution of (non-radioactive) stable isotope techniques to combat malnutrition in all its forms. Stable isotope techniques have an important role in understanding the mechanisms of malnutrition and in designing and evaluating the impact of nutrition interventions. They can assess body composition, energy expenditure, breastfeeding patterns, body vitamin A stores, and factors affecting absorption and retention of essential minerals in the body and estimates of malnutrition using these techniques often differ from self-reported data. The talk focused on the value of these techniques to generate evidence for informed nutrition programming across the life course, from infant and young child feeding, to maternal and adolescent nutrition, to healthy ageing. Cornelia also discussed the role of stable isotopes in tracking progress towards achieving World Health Assembly targets.
Materials: Seminar Recording, Presentation
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Seminar: Increasing teacher’s intrinsic motivation
Presenters: Sharath Jeevan, Founder and CEO, STIR; Nithya Gurukumar, Head of Partnerships, STIR
Chair: Omar Arias, Manager, Education Global Practice
Date: March 29, 2018
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: For the last six years STIR Education has been working to address a question: how to re-kindle the intrinsic motivation at scale among the current teaching force. In India and Uganda STIR has been working with 75,000 teachers and 2.6 million children to develop autonomy, mastery and purpose among teachers, as well as improved classroom practice. A SIEF-funded evaluation has provided rich learning around initial impact, cost effectiveness and the 'business case' to education systems to investing in teacher intrinsic motivation. It has also helped to diagnose areas where the approach can be strengthened, at both the teacher and system level, which is informing STIR's research agenda going forward.
Materials: SIEF Webpage, Seminar Recording, Presentation
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Seminar: A Toolkit for Measuring Early Childhood Development in Low- and Middle-Income Countries | Book Launch
Presenter: Elizabeth Prado, Assistant Professor, Department of Nutrition, UC Davis
Chair: Joan Lombardi, Senior Advisor, Bernard van Leer Foundation
Discussants: Reema Nayar, Practice Manager, Education Global Practice, World Bank; Maureen Black, Professor, Department of Pediatrics, RTI International, University of Maryland School of Medicine
Date: December 13, 2017
Location: World Bank J Building, Washington, DC
About: This book is a practical guide for researchers, evaluators and others interested in assessing early childhood development in low- and middle-income countries. Readers will learn how to select, adapt and implement early childhood development measurements to produce reliable and actionable data on child development for better programs and policies.
Materials: Book Webpage, Seminar Recording, Presentation
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Seminar: Combining supply- and demand side interventions to improve preschool attendance and school readiness | Evidence from Cambodia
Presenters: Adrien Bouguen, University of Mannheim; Jan Berkes, Education Global Practice, World Bank; Tsuyoshi Fukao, Education Global Practice, World Bank
Chair: Alaka Holla, Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF)
Discussant: Alonso Sanchez, Education Global Practice
Date: November 21, 2017
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: The presentation discussed midline results from an ongoing impact evaluation project in Cambodia, funded by the World Bank's Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF). This cluster randomized controlled trial will estimate the impact of three components of a preschool expansion program supported by the Ministry of Education in Cambodia: construction of new community preschools, raising awareness about the availability and importance of early education through a home-based program, and raising awareness through door-to-door visits of village chiefs. Midline results show that constructing new preschools significantly increased enrollment, whereas the demand-side interventions did not. Based on the midline survey conducted about eight months after program implementation, there were moderate effects on school readiness among 5-year-old children.
Materials: SIEF Webpage, Seminar Recording, Presentation
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Seminar: Testing and scaling-up supply- and demand-side interventions to improve kindergarten educational quality in Ghana
Presenter: Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania
Chair: Roberta Gatti, Chief Economist for Human Development
Discussant: Amer Hasan, Senior Economist, Education Global Practice
Date: September 27, 2017
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: Preliminary results from the ongoing impact evaluation of a teacher professional development program for public and private kindergartens in Ghana were presented. The cluster randomized control trial, funded by the World Bank’s Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund, is measuring the impacts of teacher training and a parenting awareness component on teacher professional well-being, classroom quality and children’s school readiness after one and two school years in the Greater Accra Region of Ghana. This study includes 240 schools randomly assigned to either receive teacher training, teacher training plus parent awareness training, or to be in the control group. The intervention includes workshops and in-classroom coaching for teachers, and video-based discussion groups for parents. Preliminary findings after one year showed that impacts on school readiness were sustained, including in social-emotional development, executive function, and early academic skills for younger children. But there were some negative impacts seen on some aspects of teaching practice.
Materials: SIEF webpage, Midline Report, Seminar Recording, Presentation
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Seminar: Can Classroom Observation and Coaching Improve Teacher Performance? The Case of Brazil
Presenter: Barbara Bruns, Visiting Fellow, Center for Global Development
Chair: Jaime Saavedra, World Bank
Discussant: Ezequiel Molina, World Bank
Date: July 13, 2017
Location: World Bank J Building, Washington, DC
About: Researchers evaluated an innovative program that focused improving the classroom effectiveness of teachers in service. In 2014, the state of Ceara in northeast Brazi state Ceará implemented a two-part strategy to improve teachers’ effectiveness: i) providing schools with an information “shock” (benchmarked feedback on their teachers' classroom practice) and ii) access to expert coaching aimed at increasing professional interaction among teachers in the same school.
Materials: SIEF webpage
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Seminar: The Impact of the Mobile Pedagogical Tutors | Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in rural Mexico
Presenters: Ciro Avitabile and Alonso Sanchez, World Bank
Chair: Reema Nayar, World Bank
Discussant: Salman Asim, World Bank
Date: July 12, 2017
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: The authors present the findings of the Mexican Mobile Tutors (APIs) program launched by the Consejo Nacional Para el Fomento de la Educacion (CONAFE) with the objective to support parents, children and teachers in a community based model that covers about 350,000 basic education students in Mexico.
Materials: SIEF webpage, Seminar Recording, Presentation (to come)
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Seminar: Cheap Talk or Real Change? CDD, CTTs and Nutrition: A Chance to Put Our Money Where our Mouth Is
Presenter: Gayatri Acharya, World Bank
Chair: Ethel Sennhauser, World Bank
Discussants: Pablo Gottret and Shobha Shetty, World Bank
Date: June 21, 2017
Location: World Bank Main Complex, Washington, DC
About: Through the now closed Social Safety Nets Project in Nepal, a Community Challenge Fund was piloted to study the effectiveness of providing nutritional information alone versus information and cash on child nutrition and development. Presenters discussed challenges in the implementation and opportunities to support nutrition positive programs.
Materials: SIEF webpage, Working Paper
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Seminar: Promoting Early Childhood Development Through Safety Nets in Africa: Opportunities and Challenges
Presenters: Laura Rawlings, Andrea Vermehren and Patrick Premand, World Bank
Chair: Lynne Sherburne-Benz, World Bank
Discussant: Sophie Naudeau, World Bank
Date: September 27, 2016
Location: World Bank J Building, Washington, DC
About: This seminar discussed the policy case for linking social protection and early childhood development interventions, outlining opportunities and challenges in program design and implementation. Researchers presented how a behavioral intervention was integrated in a safety nets program in Madagascar, to strengthen linkages between social protection and early childhood development. Finally, results were presented from a recent impact evaluation on the value-added of behavioral accompanying measures to promote parenting practices conducive to early childhood development and nutrition as part of a safety nets project in Niger.
Materials: SIEF webpage
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Seminar: Combining Pre-School Quality Interventions with Parenting Education: A Cluster Randomized Trial
Presenter: Berk Özler, World Bank
Date: January 14, 2016
Location: World Bank J Building, Washington, DC
About: Researchers evaluated a government program in Malawi, which focused on improving quality at community-based childcare centers (CBCCs) and complemented these efforts with a group-based parenting support program.
Materials: SIEF webpage
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Presenters: Dean Karlan, Professor of Economics, Yale University and Founder of IPA
Dean Karlan is a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He is also on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.Chair:
Discussant: The Chief Economist from the Human Development Vice Presidency, Roberta Gatti; Margaret Grosh, World Bank practice manager for social protection and labor; and David Wilson, World Bank program director for health nutrition and population.
Date: May 23, 2017
Location: World Bank, Washington, DC
About: Also known as A/B tests or split-tests, rapid-fire tests are nimble randomized controlled trials specifically aimed at improving product design. They are already common practice among technology-based companies as a way to iterate and rapidly improve their product and expand their use-base.
In a SIEF sponsored talk at the World Bank, Dean Karlan, a professor at Yale University and the founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, presented his research using nimble randomized controlled trials to examine demand for financial products in low-income countries and he proposed how these trials can be used to examine health, education, and social protection issues.
The adage “you get what you pay for” doesn’t always apply to evaluation work, Karlan said.
Materials: SIEF webpage, Seminar Recording, Presentation
