Using Rapid-Cycle Evaluation to Improve Program Design and Delivery
Mathematica’s mission is to bring evidence to bear on the world’s most pressing policy questions and social challenges. For over 50 years, Mathematica has been a trusted partner for government, philanthropic and private-sector organizations globally, offering support in using data for policy decisions. Our monitoring, evaluation, research, and learning (MERL) activities provide insights for decision making, learning priorities, and impact amplification. We collaborate to ensure that our efforts are responsive to our partners’ learning needs and programmatic contexts and actionable, adapting our approach to evolving priorities and changes in the internal and external landscapes.
Mathematica has a diverse portfolio of work in international education. Our research spans the education continuum, including all levels (from early childhood development and education through tertiary education and workforce development), contexts (stable contexts to crisis and crisis-affected environments), settings (formal and non-formal), and providers (state and non-state), often with a focus on the most marginalized and vulnerable populations.
In this talk, Emilie will discuss rapid-cycle evaluation (RCE) approaches to aid implementing partners in program design, mid-course corrections, and adaptive management. Through rapid, short-term tests, we provide decision-makers with actionable evidence on cost-effective operational variations to improve program effectiveness. RCEs can be used to diagnose challenges, identify facilitators to implementation and take-up, and test potential solutions. RCEs can be useful at early stages of implementation or program design to help identify operational choices that can maximize chances of a program’s success, as well as during program implementation if a program does not appear to be achieving the desired results. RCE approaches can also be used to test short-term program effectiveness, when taking a program to scale, or when seeking to adapt a successful implementation effort in a different context. Emilie’s presentation will focus on her chapter from the Oxford Handbook of Program Design and Implementation Evaluation (2023) that describes the steps involved in implementing RCE and describes examples of using RCE for program design and improvement.
Speaker:
Emilie Bagby is a Principal Researcher and the Director of Global Education at Mathematica. She specializes in designing and conducting rigorous evaluations, including impact, rapid cycle and performance, of education and workforce development programs in low- and middle-income country contexts, with a focus on disadvantaged populations. As a learning partner, she excels at identifying and implementing the appropriate methodology to generate learning, working with stakeholders to identify the most meaningful research questions to inform decision making, and combining available secondary data with primary data collection. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.