Nominate early childhood interventions

The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy has issued a call for nominations of “Social Interventions Meeting ‘Top Tier’ Evidence of Effectiveness” with a specific focus on early childhood interventions. The coalition is a non-profit and non-partisan organization that is affiliated with the Council for Excellence in Government. Its mission is “to promote government policymaking based on rigorous evidence of program effectiveness.”

Recent Congressional legislative provisions seek to focus funds in certain federal social programs on models and strategies (“interventions”) meeting Top Tier evidence of effectiveness – i.e., “that have been shown, in well-designed randomized controlled trials, to produce sizeable, sustained effects on important … outcomes.” To assist federal agencies, grantees, and others in implementing these provisions effectively, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy is launching an initiative to identify and validate interventions meeting this evidence standard. Here is a link [see end] to a 3-page Project Overview (plus appendices).

As part of the demonstration phase of this initiative, we invite all interested parties to nominate evidence-based early childhood interventions (for children age 0-6) for review as possible candidates for the Top Tier.

Here is a link [see end] to brief instructions for nominating a candidate intervention (1 page). The process is designed to be straightforward, transparent, and user-friendly. In this demonstration phase, we seek nominations of early childhood interventions; subsequent phases will address other areas of social policy.

Please note the following important aspects of the Top Tier Evidence initiative (aspects described further in the Project Overview, linked above):

Potentially large influence on policy decisions. An important aspect of this initiative is that Congress has expressed interest in it, and officially asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to monitor and assess our effort, and report on its validity. If GAO’s review is favorable, the project is well-positioned to become a uniquely authoritative – and potentially pivotal – resource for Congressional, federal agency, and state and local policymakers. (The Congressional request is shown in Appendix A of the Project Overview.)

Unique focus on identifying the relatively few interventions across social policy meeting the Top Tier standard. This focus complements that of other existing resources for identifying evidence-based interventions. Our initiative seeks specifically to be a resource to public officials (e.g., members of Congress) and others (e.g., private foundations) with responsibility for a broad policy area, who wish to concentrate effort on replicating or scaling up the few interventions in their area for which research provides the strongest confidence of a sizeable, sustained effect on people’s lives. We recognize that, for many social problems, no interventions yet meet the Top Tier standard because of gaps in research or other reasons; therefore, public officials seeking to address these problems may need to rely on evidence that falls below the Top Tier, often including nonrandomized studies. We do not seek to review such evidence, but appreciate its importance and will refer users to other high-quality resources that conduct such reviews.

Expert review of nominations by a panel of nationally-recognized, evidence-based researchers and former public officials. A list of Panel members, including their titles and affiliations, is shown in Appendix B of the Project Overview.

Links for the project overview, the instructions, and the site Social Programs that Work