The Podcast @ DC

Lab Director David Yokum and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science, Brian Nosek, discuss how the core principles of research are not part of daily practice, and they offer some ideas of how we might make them.

******************************

About our guest:

Brian Nosek is co-Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science that operates the Open Science Framework. COS is enabling open and reproducible research practices worldwide. Brian is also a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2002. He co-founded Project Implicit, a multi-university collaboration for research and education investigating implicit cognition--thoughts and feelings that occur outside of awareness or control. Brian investigates the gap between values and practices, such as when behavior is influenced by factors other than one's intentions and goals. Research applications of this interest include implicit bias, decision-making, attitudes, ideology, morality, innovation, barriers to change, open science, and reproducibility. In 2015, he was named one of Nature's 10 and to the Chronicle for Higher Education Influence list.

Despite spending billions of dollars fighting poverty in America, we know very little about the effectiveness of programs that target those most in need. There is a growing effort to measure the impact of these programs so that we can do more to help the disadvantaged. Understanding what works at the local level is key to this effort. This talk will discuss ways that local providers can measure the impact of their programs, and how this evidence will change the way we fight poverty in America.

Professor James X. Sullivan is the Rev. Thomas J. McDonagh, C.S.C. Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Notre Dame. He has been a visiting scholar at the National Poverty Center at University of Michigan and a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. His research examines the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs at the national, state, and local level. He also studies the consumption, saving, and borrowing behavior of poor households, as well as poverty and inequality measurement. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters, and his work has been covered by major media outlets including CNN, the Washington Post, Forbes, Fox News, Barron’s, Bloomberg News, Slate, the Atlantic Monthly, the Wall St. Journal, the Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, and others.

Sullivan currently serves as Director of the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO), a research center he co-founded in 2012 that works with service providers and policymakers to identify evidence-based solutions to poverty in America. LEO evaluates program effectiveness using randomized controlled trial experiments and quasi-experimental methods. In 2015 he testified at a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee hearing on evidence-based policy. Sullivan received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. in economics from Northwestern University.

Lab Director, David Yokum, and best-selling author Amanda Ripley discuss how intuition is a busted compass when it comes to education. We just can't trust our gut when it comes to judging a school, a policy reform or a teacher. Why is our intuition so useless in this arena? And what can we do about it?

About our guest:

Amanda Ripley is a writer and a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective. She is the author, most recently, of The Smartest Kids in the World--and How They Got That Way, a New York Times bestseller. Her first book, The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes--and Why, was published in 15 countries and turned into a PBS documentary. In her books and magazine writing, Amanda explores the gap between public policy and human behavior. For Time and The Atlantic, she has written cover stories on the primacy of sports in American high schools, the college of the future and the science of motivating children. She has visited schools on four continents and interviewed hundreds of kids, teachers and parents.

Amanda's work has also appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Politico, the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London. To discuss her writing, Amanda has appeared on ABC, NBC, CNN, FOX News and NPR.