Government agencies collect vast amounts of administrative data in their day-to-day activities, primarily for program operations. But the information is less often used as a research tool or fully harnessed for its evidence-building potential. This brief is the fourth in a series of publications from MDRC about the Temporary Assistance for Needy…

Project schedules are logic models that focus on the timing of program activities. Value derives from the fact that schedule changes are not random. Why they occur, and how long they last, can reveal information that would not be easily revealed with other approaches to evaluation. Also, using project schedules as logic models forges a strong link…

The nature of supervisory relationship is dynamic that changes over the course of candidacy. Subsequently, the supervision demands of supervisees also change to help them in performing certain tasks at specific research stages. In this context, this research is proposed to investigate the supervision experiences of supervisees in four different…

The Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) program was launched as an effort to address the loss of access to free and reduced-price school meals due to widespread school closures at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As schools reopened in a shifting mix of fully virtual, hybrid, and in-person formats and families lacked consistent access…

This report is a follow-up to a 2012-2013 study (see ED611342), which found that 77 of 100 large U.S. cities were coordinating the work of out-of-school-time providers, government agencies, private funders, and others to provide high-quality afterschool programs to the children who stand to benefit most. The report provides a look at the state of…

In 1994, the Midwestern Higher Education Compact (MHEC) joined its sister compacts in offering a regional student reciprocity and tuition exchange opportunity known as the Midwest Student Exchange Program (MSEP). The program allowed students from one MHEC state to attend an institution at a reduced tuition rate in another MHEC state when the…

Information literacy instruction presents a difficult balance between quantity and quality, particularly for large-scale general education courses. This paper discusses the overhaul of the freshman composition instruction program at the University of Maryland Libraries, focusing on the transition from survey assessments to a student-centered and…

We report on the implementation experience of carrying out data collection and other activities for a public health evaluation study on whether U.S. President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) investment improved utilization of health services and health system strengthening in Uganda. The retrospective study period focused on the PEPFAR…

Background: Statements or commitments making use of numbers have an important place in government policy. They appear at all stages of the policy process: campaigning, formulation, monitoring and evaluation. Many types of sources are involved including research studies, national survey information, routine operational data collections and special…

The article aims to discuss preliminary findings from a participatory monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework, used in a community-based early childhood development (ECD) programme in KwaZulu-Natal South Africa, and their implications for leadership and management. The purposes of the M&E were for LETCEE, the implementing organization,…

Historically, afterschool programs have functioned independently with little coordination among provider organizations or agencies, and public and private funders operating in isolation. Research conducted by the National League of Cities for The Wallace Foundation profiled 27 cities that were known to be taking steps to improve coordination among…

In state needs assessment meetings held in late June 2008, the leadership of two Central Region state departments of education, South Dakota and Missouri, asked Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Central to determine how the states in the region evaluate their supplemental educational service (SES) providers. Specifically, these SEA staff…

Responses from 20 of 22 Texas state government agencies using volunteers resulted in recommendations for volunteer management: standardize data collection, provide liability coverage, expand recognition programs, hire competent managers, support adequate infrastructure, replicate best practices, share best practices, encourage participation in…

Response to intervention (RTI) can be both a system for providing early interventions to struggling students and a special education diagnostic tool for evaluating and identifying students with specific learning disabilities. Contributing to the very limited literature on state-level approaches, this report describes how nine states define and…

This paper presents findings of a study that examined the extent to which children's mental health agencies can meet the information needs they consider to be most important and also comply with recommended standards of the Mental Health Statistics Improvement Projects (MHSIP). Three children's data sets representing three different agency…