BlogNews

News, ideas, and analysis from J-PAL staff and affiliated professors. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive monthly email updates.

Affiliate spotlight: Adam Osman on expanding opportunities for evaluation in the MENA region

Monday, July 9, 2018, by Hanna Juergens and Adam Osman

Adam Osman is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and co-Scientific Director of J-PAL’s Middle East and North Africa initiative. He has been a J-PAL affiliate since 2016.

How did you become interested in development economics?

I actually didn't know much about the field until after I got into graduate school. My exposure to it beforehand had been minimal and mostly from the older economic growth literature. For as long as I could remember I always had an interest in understanding why the poor were poor and what could be done to help them, but I thought this was one of those things people thought about but didn't actually study. Read More

Cultivating partnerships between health care practitioners and researchers

Thursday, June 28, 2018, by Spencer Crawford

“Trust and communication lay the foundation for a good working relationship,” shared Aaron Truchil of Camden Coalition of Health Care Providers (CCHP) with over 40 audience members, including academics and innovators in health care delivery.

Truchil’s keynote address—referencing his organization’s partnership with J-PAL affiliated researchers to evaluate CCHP’s care management program—kicked off this year’s Health Care Delivery Initiative (HCDI) workshop.

The workshop brought together researchers and... Read More

How do we know if education technology even works?

Monday, June 25, 2018, by Thomas Kane, Britt Neuhaus, and Philip Oreopoulos

This post first appeared as commentary in Education Week.

In April, the newest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores once again showed minimal progress in U.S. math and reading achievement and a widening achievement gap between our highest and lowest performers. Against this backdrop, educators today are eager for solutions that have long seemed elusive to age-old challenges in education.

Education technology will be part of... Read More

Adolescent females in India participate in an empowerment group

Evidence-informed approaches to reducing pregnancy among adolescents

Tuesday, June 12, 2018, by Rebecca Toole

In 2018, 21 million girls and young women aged 15 to 19 in developing regions are expected to become pregnant. The decisions that lead to pregnancy in adolescence are complex and do not occur in a vacuum: the broader sociocultural context, including social norms, individual beliefs and preferences, intrahousehold dynamics, and economic factors, such as income, shape an adolescent female’s decisions around marriage, sexual activity, and use of... Read More

Why enroll in the MicroMasters in Data, Economics, and Development Policy?

Friday, June 8, 2018, by Norman Simon Rodriguez

This is a guest post authored by Norman Simon Rodriguez, a MicroMasters learner in Colombia.

I am a 26-year-old Colombian political scientist with a master’s degree in Economics. I first became interested in development in 2012 when, as part of my work as an advisor in the Colombian Senate, I came across the Spanish translation of Poor Economics. 

The book was a revelation for me. It made me... Read More

Adapting a new educational approach to francophone West Africa

Thursday, May 31, 2018, by Ana Maria Tabacaru

In francophone West Africa, despite progress made in primary school enrollment rates, students’ learning levels remain low throughout primary school. For example, in Côte d’Ivoire, more than half of students did not reach a “satisfactory” level in reading and almost three in four students did not reach a “satisfactory” level in mathematics at the end of primary school. In Niger, the numbers are even lower—in both reading and math,... Read More

Training presentation

Six rules of thumb for understanding statistical power

Monday, May 21, 2018, by Rohit Naimpally and Bridget Wack

Randomized evaluations can provide credible, transparent, and easy-to-explain evidence of a program’s impact. But in order to do so, adequate statistical power and a sufficiently large sample are essential.

The statistical power of an evaluation reflects how likely we are to detect any meaningful changes in an outcome of interest (like test scores or health behaviors) brought about by a successful program. Without adequate power, an evaluation may... Read More

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