J-PAL South Asia announces its annual Executive Education Course. This five-day program on evaluating social programs will provide a thorough understanding of randomized evaluations and pragmatic step-by-step training for conducting one’s own evaluation. While the course focuses on randomized evaluations, many of the topics, such as measuring outcomes and dealing with threats to the validity of an evaluation, are relevant for other methodologies.

Program Objectives

This course is designed for people from a variety of backgrounds: managers and researchers from international development organizations, foundations, governments and non-governmental organizations from around the world, as well as trained economists looking to retool.

Course Coverage

Specifically, the following key questions and concepts will be covered:

Why and when is a rigorous evaluation of social impact needed?
The common pitfalls of evaluations, and why does randomization help.
The key components of a good randomized evaluation design.
Alternative techniques for incorporating randomization into project design.
How do you determine the appropriate sample size, measure outcomes, and manage data?
Guarding against threats that may undermine the integrity of the results.
Techniques for the analysis and interpretation of results.
How to maximize policy impact and test external validity.

The program will achieve these goals through a diverse set of integrated teaching methods. Expert researchers will provide both theoretical and example-based classes complemented by workgroups where participants can apply key concepts to real world examples.

For further details and applications for the course please click here.