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Apply for an OES Fellowship today!
We are excited to announce that the GSA Office of Evaluation Sciences (OES) is accepting applications for the 2023 Fellowship. All fellowship positions will be remote and location flexible within the United States. Fellows will serve at least a one year term, with availability to serve additional years preferred.
OES is a team of interdisciplinary experts that works across the federal government to help agencies build and use evidence. We partner with federal agencies to answer priority questions with rigorous evaluation methods and administrative data. We design and conduct impact evaluations of programs and evidence-based program changes. To date, OES has completed nearly 100 impact evaluations with dozens of agency partners.
Our evaluations, in collaboration with agency partners, span areas such as increasing environmental protection, supporting equitable delivery of the American Rescue Plan, improving public health outcomes, and increasing educational opportunity. Join the OES team if you are interested in working closely with key decision makers in government and evaluating promising interventions at a national scale!
Learn more about the OES Fellowship here.
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Annual Fellowship and Federal Details: Team members work alongside agency collaborators to make concrete recommendations on how to improve government and evaluate impact using administrative data.
- Deadline: Wednesday, January 11, 2023.
Please share this announcement with your colleagues and share any questions you have with the OES team by emailing us at oes@gsa.gov.
Please note that our team will also be holding two office hours in December to answer any questions you may have about our team, work, or the application process.
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Introducing our team’s four-year strategic plan
The OES four-year Strategic Plan outlines our goals, strategic objectives, performance measures, and key capabilities for fiscal years 2022–2025. The plan will guide our decisions over the coming years, allowing the team to make meaningful contributions to and achievements within the federal government.
 The plan positions our team to support federal agency leadership and policymakers in expanding their use of evidence to inform decisions and investments by focusing on three priority areas:
- Make access to federal programs easier and more equitable.
- Build actionable evidence relevant to federal programs and policies.
- Promote and support excellence in federal evaluation.
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Update on Incorporating Evaluation into Digital Forms
The American public spends approximately 11.5 billion hours per year filling out federal forms. Form complexity can result in lack of submission or completion, and errors on forms can cause processing delays and affect whether the form is accepted–which can have far-reaching consequences. This evaluation—a first of its kind in the federal government—brought together multiple GSA offices and the American public to learn about the feasibility of incorporating A/B testing into federal forms and to show that form design matters for form completion.
To generate a sample of over 3,000 participants (including participation from many of you - thank you!), OES facilitated outreach among the general public and federal employees. Between July 19 and August 19, 2022, individuals who volunteered to participate in the pilot were randomly assigned to one of two versions of the form. One version included the form instructions on the first page, while the other version embedded the form instructions within each page of the form.
The results offer initial evidence that form completion is affected by instruction placement. Individuals randomly assigned to the form with embedded instructions were 3.2 percentage points (36.2% versus 33.0%) more likely to submit (p=0.054, 95% CI [-0.001, 0.065]) than individual assigned to the form with instructions at the front, with this result significant at the p<0.10 level. This evaluation represents an important first step towards creating infrastructure and procedures for embedding evaluation in digital forms and towards generating rigorous evidence to inform the design of federal forms in the future.
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GSA to Build Evidence on Advancing Equitable Outcomes through the American Rescue Plan
In October, U.S. General Services Administration announced that it awarded a multi-year contract to the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to examine the role of the American Rescue Plan (ARP) in advancing equitable outcomes across a range of federal, state, and locally implemented programs. OES will support the contract in partnership with the Office of Management and Budget’s Evidence Team, the ARP Implementation Team, and other agency partners. In addition, OES will complement this study by conducting rapid, rigorous evaluations of up to ten additional ARP programs.
“Since his first day in office, President Biden has prioritized advancing equity and economic opportunity across his administration, including through the implementation of the American Rescue Plan,” said Amb. Susan Rice, White House Domestic Policy Advisor. “This new evaluation will create a critical roadmap to ensure that the work of the Biden-Harris administration continues to provide effective and equitable benefits to the American people.”
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