Learn more about OES behavioral maps, intervention packs, and evaluation designs

The OES team has recently published actual interventions, annotated to highlight behavioral insights, to allow our audiences to interact with our materials for some OES projects. We are calling these “intervention packs.”

Review our intervention packs. And, check out the redesigned notices we developed with the Social Security Administration and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the behavioral insights incorporated: 

• To inform Social Security spousal benefit recipients that they might receive a higher benefit if they applied for retirement benefits on their own record.
• To encourage Low-Income Subsidy beneficiaries to make an active choice to switch Medicare prescription drug plans.
• To inform potentially-eligible individuals about low-income Medicare programs.

OES has expanded our work to assist agencies in designing evaluations. The Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund (HEERF), created as part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) signed into law on March 27, 2020, authorized the Department of Education (ED) to provide $14 billion for institutions of higher education (IHEs). 

OES designed an impact evaluation using a regression discontinuity (RD) design—a type of quasi-experimental method—to help ED and IHEs answer the question: What is the effect of providing HEERF aid on short- and medium-term student outcomes? OES identified that many institutions used strict eligibility cutoffs that lend themselves to an RD design that can be applied with many IHEs. 

The RD design can provide evidence of the effect of one-time emergency aid on student outcomes. Evaluations using an RD design can indicate how much emergency aid programs change student outcomes. Building robust evidence may benefit from coordinated evaluations with multiple IHEs. Read the full report here and read more about our higher education portfolio here.