Today, social science researchers and evaluators are producing more knowledge than ever before—an estimated 400,000 new studies are published every year. Yet this evidence is difficult to aggregate, synthesize, interpret, and apply to everyday practice and, ultimately, policymaking. To address this important problem, the Center for Impact Sciences will convene leading experts across the fields of program evaluation, meta-analysis, prediction sciences, statistics, and econometrics, as well as policymakers and other practitioners to identify new strategies for improvement.

The Center takes on essential questions of evidence-based policy and practice through the lens of the end users: what information would be most useful to them in making decisions going forward? This is quite a bit different from how it’s typically done, where “evidence-based” is mostly retrospective analysis.

In this way, the Center is making evidenced-based analysis more accessible and actionable for policymakers by better attending to the needs of those in their organizations who do the day-to-day work of translating “evidence” into policy. The Center is one of the few places that actively thinks about evidence-based policymaking like this, prospectively.