Title: From Individual Studies to Collective Knowledge: Unlocking the Full Value of Research Evidence
Date and Time: 10:00 – 11:30 am on Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Place: Ponderosa Commons North 2012
Speaker: Fei Yuan, PhD (Education Economist, The World Bank)
Host: Yilin Pan, PhD (Assistant professor in economics of educational equity, UBC)
Speaker Bio: Fei Yuan is an education economist working at the World Bank’s development research group. Her research interests are in the economics of education, program and policy evaluation, and evidence aggregation. She previously designed and evaluated education programs in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and published in peer-reviewed journals including World Development, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, and the World Bank Economic Review. She holds a Ph.D in Education Policy and Program Evaluation from Harvard University.
Event Description: The rapid growth of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) has generated an unprecedented body of evidence on policies and programs in low- and middle-income countries. Yet researchers and policymakers often struggle to synthesize findings across studies because results are reported in different formats and require substantial manual effort to compile. The Impact Data and Evidence Aggregation Library (IDEAL) is an open-access initiative led by the World Bank that aims to address this challenge by creating a standardized, searchable, and downloadable repository of RCT evidence. IDEAL develops common protocols for capturing study characteristics, interventions, outcomes, and impact estimates, enabling more efficient and transparent evidence synthesis. This presentation will discuss the motivation for IDEAL, its core methodology, progress to date, and its implications for research and evidence-informed policymaking.