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News, ideas, and analysis from J-PAL staff and affiliated professors. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive monthly email updates.

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Not as easy as A, B, C, 1, 2, 3: Emphasizing transparency in measuring holistic skills

Characteristics like creativity or motivation can be crucial components of a successful education, yet there is relatively little knowledge or consensus on how to effectively measure them. The Learning for All Initiative (LAI) recently published a literature review and guide on how researchers...
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2024 Annual Letter from the Global Executive Director

Celebrating our twentieth anniversary around the world over the past year was a welcome opportunity to take stock of J-PAL’s journey so far—a journey that saw us expand our research network from 8 to 900 researchers, learn from 2,200 randomized evaluations across 96 countries, and reach 600 million...
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Researching racial equity: Building capacity for research and practice

Noreen Giga, Racial Equity Project Lead, and Damon Jones, J-PAL affiliated professor (University of Chicago) and Scientific Advisor for J-PAL North America’s Racial Equity Project, reflect on J-PAL North America’s work to advance rigorous research on racial equity to date and discuss priorities for...

Celebrating a decade of the AEA RCT Registry

The AEA RCT Registry serves as a central repository for information on planned, ongoing, completed, or withdrawn randomized trials in the social sciences. We're celebrating it's tenth anniversary by using the wealth of data (updated every month in the AEA Registry Dataverse) from ten years of...
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Researching racial equity: Administrative data bias

In part six of J-PAL North America’s researching racial equity blog series, we identify sources of bias in administrative data and describe these within the educational context.
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Evaluating effectiveness and equity in climate mitigation and transportation policy: A webinar recap

In December 2023, J-PAL North America’s Leveraging Evaluation and Evidence for Equitable Recovery (LEVER) program hosted a webinar in collaboration with Results for America highlighting how state and local jurisdictions can use randomized evaluation to accelerate climate action and tap into federal...
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J-PAL North America joins the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute to improve math outcomes for middle school students

In October 2023, J-PAL North America joined the Learning Engineering Virtual Institute to support organizations evaluating learning products that harness AI and machine learning to improve middle school math achievement.
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Rigorously evaluating cash transfer programs in the United States: Perspectives from other contexts

J-PAL affiliated researcher Paul Niehaus (UC San Diego) shares his perspective on studies of cash transfers in low- and middle-income countries and on how the United States can learn from other contexts.