OL 341 Assignment Three Discussion
Online Learning: OL 341 From the Ground Up for Adaptation
Center for Sustainable Development
https://csd-i.org/climate-change-adaptation-online-course/

This week’s resources:
Assignment Three Homework
Magee Example Project Assignment Three

Assignment Three. Will your theory of a solution work?
Investigating if there is a scientific basis that our proposed theory and activities have worked on other projects.
Suppose that you are a mother whose children are suffering, and an unknown organization came to you with a plan to help your children. Wouldn’t you want that plan to work?

Suppose that you are a donor hoping that your donations will fulfill some need. Wouldn’t you want your donations to have an impact?

Suppose that you were a local NGO hoping to improve the lives of your people. Wouldn’t you want to be successful?

Today it is acknowledged that development programs haven’t kept up with increasing need. One of the very simple reasons is that organizations are copying what other organizations are doing without stopping to check if their programs are working and having any lasting impact.

There is an extraordinarily simple solution to this and that is to do a bit of research to see if any studies have been done about the effectiveness of your proposed activities. For those of us who are human beings, this can be quite challenging. We think something will work, we fall in love with the idea, we become obsessed with the idea, and we won’t let go of it. But what if 100 other organizations have tried the idea, evaluators have evaluated the outcomes, and unfortunately came to the conclusion that the intervention/activity did not address the project’s problem statement nor the needs of the communities.

So, at this early stage, before you fall in love with your idea, you have the opportunity to research whether there is a basis in scientific evidence that it works.

Both universities and forward thinking organizations monitor projects in an effort to determine if they are achieving their desired impact. The results of many of those studies are available online.

So in this week’s assignment, we will take our three favorite activities, and search the Internet to see if scientists have found evidence that our chosen activities work to solve the problem statement that we prepared.

Searching for information on your proposed activities is a bit of an art. Right now, this instant, open up a Word document and save it under the name ‘key words.’ Every time that you search for something on the Internet with a set of keywords that perform well for you, add them to your ‘key words’ document and save them. Frequently, you will find in scientific documents a list of keywords which authors used for themselves to research their studies. Save those too. Soon, you will have an arsenal of keywords that will make you into an expert of searching for scientific documents.

What is a scientific, peer-reviewed, document?
A cornerstone idea behind science is that investigators don’t let their personal thoughts, feelings and needs become muddled with the results of their investigation. One of the techniques for ensuring that is to share a draft of their study with their scientific peers. If their peers feel that a scientist has not kept an arms length distance in their analysis, they will recommend corrections. This becomes known as a peer-reviewed study. It is these studies that we are looking for.

If you are connected to a university these studies will be easy to find. Universities subscribe to scientific search engines which are programmed to find scientific studies.

If you don’t work for a university you can go to the ‘research access’ section in Links to Development Sites in the column on your left, and you’ll find links to free sites.

But let’s go to Google for a moment. With a good collection of keywords, Google is tremendously powerful and can lead you to many papers that are freely downloadable online. Make sure that they’re from a reputable university or research institute.

Google Scholar
Google also has a site called Google Scholar which only connects to scientific documents: a gold mine.

These documents will give you an abstract or executive summary that will tell you in one paragraph the results of the study. The body of the study will give you the information on why the activity did or did not work and under what circumstances. The circumstances are very important because you may discover that your proposed activity may not work in some situations—but will work perfectly in a different situation. Make sure that your proposed activity has shown evidence of having worked in your situation.

What if you find evidence that your proposed activity doesn’t work? Analyze if the problem entails a minor modification to the activity (which you may be able to do). Otherwise, search for activities that will work that you haven’t thought of yet. I use plain English in Google in these situations and have had good luck. For example, for my project I used: “What works in reducing diarrhea in developing nations?” This brought forth a gold mine of information.

Community Based Adaptation Discussion
This week we’re going to be looking at scientific studies that may give us evidence that a given activity/intervention works in solving an adaptation challenge.

Unfortunately, because adaptation projects are still relatively new, and community-based adaptation projects or even newer, not much has been published yet. Sometimes these scientific studies require years of observation in order to gather information.

However, if you go to the class homepage and look at Specialized Links to Adaptation Documents and Sites you will find that I have posted the most relevant information that I’ve been able to find over the past few years.