The Scale-Up Effect in Public Policy: Understanding and Addressing Threats to Scalability

In recent years, citizens and lawmakers have become increasingly enthusiastic about adopting evidence-based policies and programs. Social scientists have delivered evidence on countless interventions that positively impact people’s lives. And yet, most programs, when expanded, have not delivered the dramatic societal impacts promised. In order to truly reap the benefits of evidence-based interventions (practices, programs, and policies), researchers and practitioners must figure out how to take these programs from small-scale experiments and implement at scale in a way that enables population-level impacts. This course builds on an economic model (The science of using science: towards an understanding of threats to scalability by Omar Al-Ubaydli, John List, and Dana Suskind) to explore the threats to scalability i.e. phenomenon by which the magnitude of a treatment effect changes when an intervention moves from research setting to population-wide implementation. This course will examine some of the most critical questions of public policy: Why have we failed to bring evidence-based programs found to be effective in small-scale experiments to the population level? How can we scale such programs effectively? How can researchers, practitioners, and policymakers work together to bring fundamental changes in research and program design.