High-quality impact studies of education interventions provide the strongest evidence about whether interventions improve academic outcomes. Yet information about whether and by how much a tested intervention improves outcomes is only part of the story. To learn why and how impact findings vary and to support the broader use of effective interventions, educators need to understand how, and under what conditions, an intervention was implemented. High-quality implementation research can contribute to these understandings. To encourage this important work, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) articulates, through the Standards for Excellence in Education Research (SEER), key recommendations concerning documenting treatment implementation and contrast.

In this 90-minute webinar, Carolyn Hill from MDRC and Lauren Scher from Mathematica will present an overview of IES’s recently-released guide, Conducting Implementation Research in Impact Studies of Education Interventions. They will be joined by a panel of researchers who will share their experiences conducting implementation research as part of high-quality impact studies of education interventions, including:

• Addressing some common issues when measuring intervention fidelity
• Mitigating challenges when measuring implementation contrast
• Integrating implementation and impacts

The session will include a panel discussion and audience Q&A.

Panelists: 

• Barbara Goodson, Principal Associate at Abt Associates, has led numerous implementation and impact evaluations of educational programs for children birth through grade 12. She leads the implementation evaluation technical assistance for grantees in the U.S. Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program and has worked with more than 300 grantees to measure and report on fidelity of implementation.
• Catherine Darrow, Associate Director of Research at J-PAL North America, leads J-PAL’s research activities producing evidence to better understand whether and how programs work to reduce poverty in the North America region. She has designed and directed rigorous impact and implementation evaluations of school-based programs serving children to young adults.
• Howard Bloom, Former MDRC Chief Social Scientist, led MDRC’s development and application of experimental and quasi-experimental methods from 1999 to 2017. For the previous two decades, he taught research methods, program evaluation, and applied statistics to public policy graduate students at Harvard and NYU, where he received the university-wide Great Teacher Award in 1993. For his many methodological contributions, Dr. Bloom received the Peter Rossi Award from APPAM in 2010 and was inducted into the National Academy of Education in 2019.