This report explores the Annie E. Casey Foundation's Deep-End Initiative, which is helping juvenile justice jurisdictions safely and significantly reduce youth confinement -- especially for young people of color. In America today, youth of color are consistently over-represented in courtrooms and detention centers, youth prisons and other…

Performance-based scholarships have two main goals: (1) to give students more money for college; and (2) to provide incentives for academic progress. MDRC launched the Performance-Based Scholarship (PBS) Demonstration in 2008 to evaluate the effectiveness of these scholarships in a diverse set of states, institutions, and low-income student…

The U.S. Department of Education's Policy to Performance project was funded in 2009 to build the capacity of state adult basic education (ABE) staff to develop and implement policies and practices that would support an ABE transition system. Policy to Performance states were selected though a competitive process. State adult education directors…

The "Policy to Performance Toolkit" is designed to provide state adult education staff and key stakeholders with guidance and tools to use in developing, implementing, and monitoring state policies and their associated practices that support an effective state adult basic education (ABE) to postsecondary education and training transition…

This article explores the statistical methodologies used in demonstration and effectiveness studies when the treatments are applied across multiple settings. The importance of evaluating and how to evaluate these types of studies are discussed. As an alternative to standard methodology, the authors of this article offer an empirical binomial…

During their three-year research project, the authors found that most practitioners, researchers, and policymakers in the education field were not familiar with Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) or the existing research on IDAs. Therefore, in this paper the authors compiled a list of some of the references that they found useful and that they…

The methodology and design of the process evaluation system of the Pawtucket Heart Health Program (an 11-year project for changing/documenting change in cardiovascular disease risk status of a northeastern city's residents) are described. Examples of the system's use are provided. The maintenance of such a system without substantial evaluation…

Preparation of this paper facilitated by Grant GS-1741 from the Division of Social Sciences of the National Science Foundation.

To the data analyst, outliers can present both a problem and an opportunity. Stray or outlying observations can severly distort estimates of a distribution's central tendency (like the mean) and estimates of one variable's relationship to another (like the regression coefficient). These problems are frequent and serious, and as a result,…

The site variability issue for Direct Instruction Follow Through sites is examined from a variety of perspectives--meta-analysis of the Abt Associates' data, norm-referenced comparisons, and a longitudinal look at stability of effects. Much of the seemingly unexplained variability found in both the Abt report and the reports by M. Kennedy and E.…

The Compensatory Education Demonstration Projects are a three-year study of the effects of changes in ESEA Title I fund allocation at the intra-district level. Thirteen Local Education Agencies (LEAs) are cooperating in this research. During 1975-76 these school districts conducted their Title I programs under current federal Title I guidelines.…

This report describes and evaluates the first year of a demonstration project to develop an on-demand telecommunications network linking four remote hospitals in southwestern Ohio to the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. The Telecommunications Information Network (TIN) is designed to allow health care professionals at those hospitals to…

This paper discusses evaluation of human service programs. Evaluation can be useful because: (1) evaluative data can be relevant to the basic goal of a demonstration to field test some strategy or technique; (2) process evaluation can help generate enthusiasm for self-improvement among staff; (3) evaluation can help build a communication network…

The Model Accounting Plan (MAP) is a demographic accounting system designed to meet three major goals related to improving planning, evaluation, and monitoring of special education programs. First, MAP provides local-level data for administrators and parents to monitor the progress, transition patterns, expected attainments, and associated costs…