Check out our upcoming events and workshops.

Recent OES Events

OES@100: Celebrating 100 Collaborations Across Government

Tuesday, November 16, 2021, 1:00-2:30pm ET via Zoom

image OES celebrated completing 100 collaborations across government this year. Distinguished speakers discussed insights gained from OES’ evaluation portfolio to date and future priorities for evidence-building.

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 FY2022 training schedule is available here.

Upcoming Federal Workshops

Making the Case for Evaluation

Highlights ways to demonstrate the value of evaluation to peers, leaders, and others in their agency

Understanding Null Results

This workshop will dispel misconceptions about null results and highlight different uses for and lessons from null results.

Past Federal Workshops

Identifying Resources for Evaluation

Explored ways that agencies have identified new or leveraged existing resources to support evaluation and build capacity in resource-limited environments.

Evaluation Utilization: How to Promote Evaluation Use

How Federal staff can support the dissemination and use of evaluation by colleagues across their agencies.

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 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.

Understanding the Paperwork Reduction Act and its Implications for Evaluation Information Collections

This workshop provided participants with a deeper understanding the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) and its implications for data collected for evaluations. Featuring speakers from OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) and Evidence Team, this interactive session provided an overview of the PRA and its requirements and offered insight as to OIRA’s review of evaluation-focused packages.

Why Randomize? A Case Study

This interactive session, presented by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab - North America, walked participants through a real‐life case.

Introduction to Formative and Process Evaluations

Formative and Process Evaluations can be important tools for assessing whether a program is appropriate and feasible in a given context, and understanding how a program is working. This workshop provided an introduction to common tools and methodologies used in these types of evaluations.

Asking the Right Question: Tips and Tools to Help Agencies Formulate Strong Questions to Yield Actionable Results

In order to get what you need, you have to ask the right question! This workshop helped participants understand how to articulate and write learning agenda and evaluation questions that would result in useful information for decision-making.

Cost Analysis in Evaluation

Introduction to cost analysis: discuss the types of cost analysis used in evaluation and highlight how answering cost questions can inform policies and programs.

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.

Building Logic Models for Evaluation

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

Introduction to Quasi-Experimental Designs

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

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)