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Creating Evidence that
Catalyzes Change to Learning
and Training Systems
As a learning organization, we believe that credible evidence is critical to the continuous improvement of postsecondary education and workforce training systems. This can happen at two key levels. First, individual organizations can generate and use evidence to refine and improve their work. Second, evidence produced by high-quality independent evaluations helps all of us — practitioners, policymakers, funders — better understand the policies, practices, and programs that are most impactful and warrant scaling. Good evidence, therefore, helps shift the postsecondary education and workforce training systems overall and the organizations within those systems to produce better outcomes for learners from low-income backgrounds.
With good evidence, we aim to shift postsecondary education and workforce training systems to produce better outcomes for learners from low-income backgrounds.
Investing in Independent Evaluations
Independent evaluations can build evidence about what works and for whom. Evaluations can also deepen our understanding of the conditions that enable or prohibit the expansion of proven solutions. Our main goal in funding evaluations, or validation grants, is to increase the number of reforms and innovations that improve outcomes for learners from low-income backgrounds.
Our continued partnership with Dr. Ben Castleman at the University of Virginia provides an example. Castleman’s research team is conducting an evaluation of Merit America, a sectoral training provider. The evaluation supports Merit America in continuously improving its suite of programs while contributing to a shifting narrative about the effectiveness of workforce training programs. It will also hopefully catalyze new policy action to support training programs, like those offered by Merit America, that deliver upward mobility for learners.
Supporting Our Partners in Assessing and Learning from Progress, Success, and Failure
When entering a new grant partnership, we support all partners in setting and reporting on key milestones. This ensures we have a shared understanding of progress, success, and what we could learn and share with others. Critical first steps include helping partners prioritize the right activities and outputs that can lead to meaningful change for learners, organizations, and systems. We then support partners over the duration of the grant to reflect on those milestones, understand their progress, and if necessary, adapt in real-time based on the lessons learned.