Upcoming and previous events

Evaluation and Evidence Training Series

This training series is a continuing partnership between the Office of Management and Budget’s Evidence Team (OMB) and OES. All trainings will be held via webinar on Zoom for Government. These workshops are for Federal Executive Branch employees only. Register online for upcoming workshops and see resources from past workshops at the MAX.gov site. A PDF of the FY2021 training schedule is available here.

Upcoming Federal Workshops

Using Evidence to Inform Agency Priorities (Hosted by OMB Evidence Team)

Highlight ways that agencies can use evidence to inform agency priorities, both mission and operational.

Building Logic Models for Evaluation

Hands-on practice in developing and using a logic model to inform evaluation activities.

Evidence Act – Lessons from the First Two Years of Implementation

Discuss agencies’ experiences and lessons learned from the first two years of implementation of the Evidence Act.

Past Federal Workshops

Introduction to Quasi-Experimental Designs

Introduction to impact evaluation designs, other than randomized controlled trials, to understand program impacts.

Understanding Null Results

Discuss and dispel misconceptions about evaluations that show no evidence of impact or provide evidence of no impact, and highlight uses for null results.

How to Conduct Randomized Controlled Trials

This session helped participants learn how to conduct randomized controlled trials, and addressed common challenges and misconceptions.

Evaluation 101

In partnership with the Office of Management and Budget’s Evidence Team, OES offered Evaluation 101, an introduction to evaluation for Federal staff. This workshop, conducted three times, served as an introduction to evaluation as a method to answer important questions, including what evaluation is, what questions it can and cannot answer, and how it can help agencies better understand their programs, policies, and operations.

Creative Uses of Administrative Data

OES hosted a virtual session on creative uses of administrative data. This session highlighted creative and innovative ways that agencies have used administrative data to conduct evaluations and build evidence.

Evidence Act Toolkits: A Guide to Learning Agendas and Annual Evaluation Plans

OES staff shared a summary of the motivation for toolkits to assist agencies in building Learning Agendas and Annual Evaluation Plans, as well as highlighted specific tools and resources developed. For more information on the toolkits, please visit oes.gsa.gov/toolkits.

Exploring Ways to Identify Resources and Opportunities to Support Evaluation Activities

OES and the Office of Management and Budget’s Evidence Team co-hosted a workshop on identifying the resources needed to support evaluation activities. Agency partners shared ways that agencies have identified new or leveraged existing resources to support evaluation and build capacity in resource‐limited environments.

Past OES Events

What is the impact of applying behavioral insights in government?

Discussion of positive findings from a recent large-scale review

Join OES in a discussion of the impact of behavioral insights in government. UC Berkeley’s Elizabeth Linos will present their findings from a massive review of behavioral interventions in federal and local government. Members of the Office of Evaluation Sciences and the Behavioral Insights Team, along with federal experts, will share reactions and offer thoughts on next steps.

The recent paper “RCTs to Scale: Comprehensive Evidence from Two Nudge Units” analyzes how effective behaviorally informed interventions were in 126 trials across many policy areas and involving 24 million people. The researchers found an overall effect of these interventions to be statistically significant and positive at 1.4 percentage points, which translates to a relative increase of 8.1% on priority program and policy outcomes. Notably, 87% of the OES interventions analyzed were of no marginal cost or low cost, suggesting that applying behavioral insights can be very cost effective.

In addition to discussing the findings in detail, the conversation will underline the value of sharing all results — positive, negative and null — so that we are able to get a clearer and more accurate picture of impacts, and offer guidance to help us design better interventions and evaluations in the future and help give a more realistic picture of possible impacts and outcomes.

Using Evidence: Learning from Low-Cost Federal Evidence Building Activities

The U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) and numerous agency collaborators presented on how the federal government uses low-cost evaluations, unexpected results, and administrative data to inform policy and program decisions. OES staff, collaborators from multiple agencies, and distinguished academic partners presented new results and lessons learned from over 10 OES evaluations in three sessions: Learning from Low-Cost Evaluations, Learning from Unexpected Results, and Learning from Administrative Data. All sessions included information and examples relevant to meeting the requirements of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (Evidence Act)