The program and policy change framework: A new tool to measure research use in low- and middle-income countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Organizations that fund research to address global development challenges are increasingly interested in measuring the social and economic outcomes of research. However, traditional metrics for measuring research outputs are often insufficient for capturing the outcomes targeted by international assistance organizations. To address this, the Center for Development Research (CDR), part of the U.S. Global Development Lab at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), has designed a new tool: the Program and Policy Change (PPC) framework for tracking and quantifying the influence of research on program and policy change in international development. The framework draws on existing conceptual frameworks of evidence uptake and the literature on policy change. This article describes the design of the PPC framework and presents the results of applying the framework to two USAID research programs. The benefits of the framework include applicability across research sectors, focus on evidence-informed policy at various levels of geographical influence, and inclusion of a numeric scoring system that enables quantification of outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Evaluation · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Methods About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Theoretical or conceptual | low |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.105 | 0.154 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.050 | 0.036 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".