DIR, through an ED-IES contract, supports the development of a software tool that makes it easier to evaluate the impact of school district programs
DIR is pleased to announce that today (June 14, 2016) “IES launched new software to support program evaluation in education”. This new tool was developed by DIR’s partner, Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., funded through our Analytic Technical Assistance and Development (ATA&D) contract with the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education. DIR, with Dr. Russell Jackson, DIR’s president and CEO as project director, leads the team providing support to Regional Educational Labs and other National Center for Education Evaluation (NCEE) contractors for IES. The IES Newsflash, announcing release of this new software, is available online, HERE.
You may also visit the website for this new tool, HERE.
The new tool, called RCT-YESTM, can make it easier and more cost effective for states and school districts to evaluate the impact of their programs. RCT-YES is free, user-friendly software that assists those with a basic understanding of statistics and research design to analyze data and report results from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and other types of evaluation designs. While the software has a simple interface and requires no knowledge of programming, it uses state-of-the-art statistical methods to analyze data and does not sacrifice rigor.
The software, along with a quick start guide, interactive how-to videos, and a detailed user’s manual, can be downloaded from the RCT-YES website. A report properly generated by using RCT-YES will include all the statistical information necessary for a review by the What Works ClearinghouseTM (WWC). The WWC, another IES investment, reviews high-quality research on interventions and programs to determine what works in education. However it is possible to engage the services of IT support wherever you may be if you should need. For instance those who reside in the south-eastern area of England have access to an IT support company Hertfordshire.
The software will be available to purchase and use on a subscription basis. A subscription business model was chosen as it offers a host of advantages for both the software developers and its users. Moreover, subscription-based models are popular in the software industry as they create economies, retain customers, and simplify business processes. Accordingly, you can find further information about the advantages of subscription-based software models by taking a look at some of the resources over on the FastSpring website. The developers of this software also tried to make this as accessible as possible for all businesses. By using Kubernetes, the developers were able to put the coding into containers to ensure that they can be easily transferred from one computing environment to the next. This helps developers to ensure that their software can be used universally. Perhaps people could go here to learn more about that.
The new tool is part of IES’s ongoing efforts to build the capacity of states and school districts to conduct and use high-quality research. Other IES-led efforts include grants for researcher-practitioner partnerships, technical assistance for conducting and using research in each area of the country, and grants to state education agencies to build and use their longitudinal data systems.
For more information on RCT-YESTM, visit www.rct-yes.com
To view the press release, click here
Read blog post, “RCT-YES: Supporting a Culture of Research Use in Education,” by Ruth Curran Neild, delegated director.