Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Background: The i3 Technical Assistance and Evaluation Project was funded at the same time that the first cohort of i3 grants was awarded, and has two goals: 1) to provide evaluation technical assistance and other resources to support the design and conduct of rigorous evaluations and 2) to conduct periodic reviews of the strength of the designs and findings from the evaluations. Abt Associates assembled a team of highly qualified technical assistance providers to develop and deliver TA resources, and assembled a separate team of reviewers to objectively assess the designs and completed evaluations.

Findings: This paper will discuss findings from the forthcoming report for IES on the i3 Program. The report will describe and summarize the wide array of resources provided to the i3 3^rdparty evaluators. We will also describe the strength of the evaluation designs along several dimensions, including internal validity, independence, extent to which the analyses were pre-specified, extent to which the findings were relevant to assessing the impact of the intervention on those served, as well as the strength of the evaluations of implementation fidelity. Finally, we will discuss the strength of the evaluations as conducted along those same dimensions, to characterize the contribution of i3 to the evidence base on educational interventions. The authors will discuss connections between the achieved strength of evidence and the supports provided.

Conclusions: The paper will discuss future efforts to make the tools and resources provided to the i3 evaluators available to a broader audience.