RAND Corporation

About: RAND Corporation is a nonprofit organization based out in Santa Monica, California, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Health care & Population. The organization has 9602 authors who have published 18570 publications receiving 744658 citations.

The Intertemporal Variability of Teacher Effect Estimates

Abstract: The utility of value-added estimates of teachers' effects on student test scores depends on whether they can distinguish between high- and low-productivity teachers and predict future teacher performance. This article studies the year-to-year variability in value-added measures for elementary and middle school mathematics teachers from five large Florida school districts. We find year-to-year correlations in value-added measures in the range of 0.2–0.5 for elementary school and 0.3–0.7 for middle school teachers. Much of the variation in measured teacher performance (roughly 30–60 percent) is due to sampling error from “noise” in student test scores. Persistent teacher effects account for about 50 percent of the variation not due to noise for elementary teachers and about 70 percent for middle school teachers. The remaining variance is due to teacher-level time-varying factors, but little of it is explained by observed teacher characteristics. Averaging estimates from two years greatly improves t...

Back to Work: Expectations and Realizations of Work after Retirement

Abstract: This paper analyzes a puzzling aspect of retirement behavior known as "unretirement." Nearly 50 percent of retirees follow a nontraditional retirement path that involves partial retirement or unretirement, and at least 26 percent of retirees later unretire. I explore two possible explanations: 1) unretirement transitions result from failures in planning or financial shocks; and 2) unretirement transitions are anticipated prior to retirement, reflecting a more complex retirement process. I show that unretirement was anticipated for the vast majority of those returning to work, and is not a result of financial shocks, poor planning or low wealth accumulation.

The Researcher and The Manager: A Dialectic of Implementation

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to review various opinions and differences of opinion which have been expressed concerning that aspect of research referred to as “implementation” We have used the term “implementation” to refer to the manner in which the results of scientific effort may come to be used by the manager The “problem of implementation” is the problem of determining what activities of the scientist and the manager are most appropriate to bring about an effective relationship between the two

Interventions in Organizational and Community Context: A Framework for Building Evidence on Dissemination and Implementation in Health Services Research

Abstract: The effective dissemination and implementation of evidence-based health interventions within community settings is an important cornerstone to expanding the availability of quality health and mental health services. Yet it has proven a challenging task for both research and community stakeholders. This paper presents the current framework developed by the UCLA/RAND NIMH Center to address this research-to-practice gap by: (1) providing a theoretically-grounded understanding of the multi-layered nature of community and healthcare contexts and the mechanisms by which new practices and programs diffuse within these settings; (2) distinguishing among key components of the diffusion process—including contextual factors, adoption, implementation, and sustainment of interventions—showing how evaluation of each is necessary to explain the course of dissemination and outcomes for individual and organizational stakeholders; (3) facilitating the identification of new strategies for adapting, disseminating, and implementing relatively complex, evidence-based healthcare and improvement interventions, particularly using a community-based, participatory approach; and (4) enhancing the ability to meaningfully generalize findings across varied interventions and settings to build an evidence base on successful dissemination and implementation strategies.