Accurately Reported
“Prespecification” or “preregistration” – the publication of a study’s analysis plan prior to estimating program impacts – is an important activity which has long been practiced in medical research and is happily becoming more common in randomized control trials…
Read more →
As funders of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), our primary goal is to identify programs and strategies that can meaningfully improve people’s lives, and, importantly, that can be shown to do so in more than one study across different settings. Because many promising…
Read more →
Accurately Reported
★
Credible Positive Finding
Two years ago, we wrote about highly-promising initial findings for Year Up – a workforce training program for low-income young adults – in a large RCT sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Administration for Children and Families. The key…
Read more →
Recent randomized controlled trials (RCTs) refute the claim that hydroxychloroquine is a viable medical intervention for COVID-19, and show that policymakers erred in touting its effectiveness based on less rigorous studies. The lesson? It’s critical to build and prioritize…
Read more →
Not Accurately Reported
In this report, we discuss recent findings of a federally-sponsored RCT of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Assets for Independence program. As detailed below, we believe this study illustrates an all-too-common problem in program evaluations: In…
Read more →
Not Accurately Reported
In this report we discuss newly-published findings in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (JPAM) on the long-term effects of the federal Job Corps program. Job Corps, established in 1964, is the nation’s largest residential career training program for at-risk young…
Read more →
Accurately Reported
★
Credible Positive Finding
In this report, we highlight positive new findings from a large replication RCT of Nevada’s Reemployment and Eligibility Assessment (REA) program for unemployment insurance (UI) claimants. The new findings—sizable earnings gains, sustained over at least three…
Read more →
Accurately Reported
★
Credible Positive Finding
Newly-Reported RCT Findings: ASAP program nearly doubles three-year graduation rates of low-income community college students in Ohio, reproducing large impacts in an earlier RCT in New York. Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) is a comprehensive community college…
Read more →
Accurately Reported
Earlier this month, The New England Journal of Medicine published findings from an RCT of the Camden Coalition’s hotspotting program for patients with very high use of health care services (i.e., “superutilizers”).[1] The findings, which received national press coverage,…
Read more →
As regular readers of our Straight Talk newsletter are aware, we focus our reports primarily on findings of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The reason is that RCTs, when well-conducted, are widely considered the strongest method of evaluating a program’s…
Read more →