Every summer, we welcome doctoral students as they develop independent research projects on their journey from inquiry to insight. Meet this year’s fellows and find out more about our fellowship program.

Evaluating the performance of school principals can be challenging. As we noted in previous posts, principals’ roles are complex and multi-faceted.

Researchers from EDI Group and Mathematica discuss the added value of qualitative methods and spotlight how a mixed-method approach is providing important insights about how well reading and community engagement programs are serving young children and their parents in Nicaragua.

Researchers and policymakers across a number of fields have long understood the power of peer-to-peer learning.

Social determinants of health—the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age—have gained increasing interest among policymakers and practitioners as they struggle to improve the value and quality of U.S. health care.

In this week’s episode of On the Evidence, Mathematica’s Beth Weigensberg talks about an article she co-authored describing findings from a 2013 needs assessment on the challenges state agencies faced in using their data to inform their programs.

In order to improve patients’ overall health and well-being, we need better information about their social determinants of health – the social, behavioral, and environmental factors – which influence the health and well-being of individuals and communities.

Simply put, 2019 has been a big year for primary care in the United States. Whether you follow federal or state healthcare news or simply follow investor-entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Twitter, it’s likely you’ve seen how the conversation about primary care has been elevated.

In this episode of On the Evidence, Cindy Hu, a Mathematica data scientist, discusses the prevalence of Poly- and Perfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) in our drinking water, as well as their health implications and ways to address them through public policy.

With their multi-faceted understanding of the communities in which they operate, community-based organizations bring a valuable lens that could help health systems learn how certain social services received in the community affect health, and how other factors may dampen an intervention’s effect.

A strong economy requires a dynamic workforce that can adapt to the labor market’s demands. This often means workers will have schedules outside the traditional 9 to 5.

By using an enterprise risk management approach, state Medicaid agencies can meet new federal program integrity requirements, serve more clients, improve the quality of care, and contain costs.

The topic of exclusionary discipline is not only of professional interest to me—it’s personal. Helping my son navigate the middle grades was taxing. He attended a school that suspended him for defending himself when a classmate broke his iPad and then punched him during recess to instigate a fight.

In this week’s episode of On the Evidence, Genna Cohen and Llew Brown, who research and work with electronic health records (EHRs) at Mathematica, discuss challenges in adopting EHRs as well as what to do about them.

Paul Messino offers insights on challenges states face as they implement health payment and delivery system reforms and the ways that Mathematica applies methods expertise, deep policy knowledge, and understanding of state contexts to help navigate to better outcomes.

Right now, more than 3.6 million public school teachers are preparing their classrooms, meeting with parents, reviewing lesson plans, and getting to know rooms full of students whose lives they will touch in countless ways.

Educators hold the keys to unlocking a brighter future for their students, whether engaging with parents, creating a supportive environment that values equity and inclusion, or improving instruction.

This post describes how health care systems and providers have been—and can be—critical partners in collecting and acting on social determinants of health data.

Mathematica and EDI Global staff share insights and read passages from The Little Prince to help call attention to the importance of embracing linguistic diversity in education and literacy interventions.

In this episode of On the Evidence, University of Rhode Island's Annette Bourbonniere, Webility Corporation's Jennifer Christian, and Mathematica's Yonatan Ben-Shalom discuss research on workers who miss work because of an injury or illness and how to help them remain in the labor force.

Mathematica.org focuses on who we are – an employee owned company committed to the public good. You can still count on our rigor, objectivity, and insights, but this is also an important step in articulating how we’re fulfilling our mission to improve public well-being. This is progress together.

On this episode of On the Evidence, we talk about a report that looks at the complicated relationships among nonstandard or changing work schedules, the availability of child care for those schedules, and child well-being. Our guests are Angela Rachidi and Russell Sykes, who coauthored the report.

Senior Researcher Kristen Velyvis highlights the long-term impact of a program designed to improve nutrition and food security for more than 200,000 households with chronic food insecurity in southern Malawi.

In the 21st century, the civic purpose of public education is often overlooked in debates that tend to focus on education’s economic effects. But the civic purpose is arguably more important than it has ever been.

Mathematica is proud to be 100 percent employee owned. Employee ownership is a critical component of who we are, and it shapes how we work together as colleagues.

Too many conversations about the promise of using data to drive decisions lead with new steps, new requirements, new resource needs, and new expectations that are simply out of reach for too many. It doesn’t have to be that way.

On the Evidence interviewed Mathematica’s Matt Stagner about his upcoming APPAM presidential address, his work on child welfare, and his reflections on public policy research. This interview is part of a series of episodes produced by Mathematica in support of the APPAM conference in November.

Each day, millions of people between the ages of 16 and 24 don’t attend school or head to work. Instead, these young people—often called opportunity youth—face greater risk of social exclusion, poverty, and falling behind without the skills to improve their lives.

Principals and assistant principals play a key role in improving student outcomes, but assessing leaders’ effectiveness is hard and finding the right measure takes time. School leaders influence students in complex and indirect ways, making it difficult to measure these effects.

For this episode of On the Evidence, we spoke with the principal investigators for the project: Dave Jones, an associate director in the Health Unit at Mathematica, and Dave Frisvold, an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Iowa.

Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in all that we do means thinking critically about what diversity means and taking important steps to create a Mathematica where everyone feels welcome and can cultivate a meaningful career.

In 2013, I led a team of researchers who traveled to Minnesota, Kansas, and Missouri for a series of in-depth interviews with fathers for the Parents and Children Together (PACT) evaluation.

On this episode of On the Evidence, we feature six short interviews with the 2019 summer fellows about the research questions they pursued and what they have learned so far.

Time will tell what improvements artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive algorithms can bring to healthcare, and at what cost, but it is past time to tackle the bigger ethical considerations that loom large over the future of the industry.

We can’t expect policymakers, program administrators, and practitioners to stumble upon new evidence (let alone slog their way through multiple field-specific academic journals). As an evidence community, we have to do more to show them the way to research-based insights.

On this episode of On the Evidence, economists Jennifer Doleac and Kosali Simon share lessons from their experiences interpreting and translating policy research for media interviews, Twitter, podcasts, and elsewhere.

Medicaid and CHIP quality improvement often focuses on the big picture, but to be confident that new efforts will lead to improvement, we also need quality measures that can be captured earlier.

This video depicts how a program improvement approach—known as Rapid-Cycle Evaluation—can provide administrators with evidence about what works to improve services.

We are living in unprecedented times. To reduce the spread of COVID-19, more than 130 countries have closed schools entirely, impacting 80 percent of the world’s student population.

On this episode of On the Evidence, three researchers discuss how they work with child welfare agencies in the United States to use algorithms—or, what they call predictive risk models—to inform decisions by case managers and their supervisors.

Across the United States and around the world, in-person survey data collection has been halted to protect against COVID-19 spread; now what?

The field of education evolves constantly and is now changing rapidly because of COVID-19. In the face of this pandemic, we continue to refine our practices.

Congress passed the largest economic stimulus package in our nation’s history, one of several ways Congress is helping America weather the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.