Methods Note: Reporting table templates.

On the CAP Project resources page you can find Cost Analysis Results Table Templates, an Excel workbook that includes two different table designs, provided as example templates for cost analysts to display results. For each table, there are two versions: one that can be used in a report, and a plainly-formatted version for journal manuscripts.

Each table includes a list of ingredients or resources needed to implement an education program/practice, categorized by personnel, materials, facilities, and other inputs. You can replace these with your own program-specific ingredients and modify the tables, e.g., by adding more rows for additional ingredients and more columns for additional sites.

Costs per Site Table: This is useful when your study includes a small number of sites and where costs differ enough to make it worthwhile showing how they vary across the sites.

Lo Mean Hi Costs Table: This template provides an alternative format for cost analysis results which may be more useful when you have too many sites to include each site in a table.

Methods Note: Fixed/Lumpy/Variable Cost Breakdown
Reviewers, funders, and educators often ask for a breakdown of costs into fixed, lumpy, and variable costs. Why? It matters when decision-makers consider scaling up a program. Fixed costs won’t change, variable costs will go up directly in line with the number of participants served, and lumpy costs will increase at intervals. So this categorization can be important when predicting costs of implementing a program for additional participants or sites such as schools or districts. Of course, there is usually some level of scale at which even a “fixed” cost becomes lumpy.

Methods Note. Cost-effectiveness plane (CE Plane)

On the CAP Project Resources page you’ll find a one-pager - CE Plane - which shows you how to report cost-effectiveness ratios on a simple scatter plot chart to make interpretation easy. You can use a CE plane to compare costs and effects of a single program implemented at multiple sites if you have site-level costs and effects. Or you can compare multiple programs that target the same outcome (e.g., reading comprehension) and the same types of participants (e.g., below grade middle school readers), if the control conditions are similar.

Just be aware that you may come across CE planes where the control condition is different for each program reported so the origin of the chart, which represents the control or business-as-usual condition, represents a rather murky condition so the incremental costs of the treatment programs are not directly comparable. This is parallel to the problem in meta-analysis whereby different studies have different control conditions so it's not clear that the effect sizes are truly comparable. With costs, there are additional questions about whether they are all expressed in local or national prices, the year in which the prices are expressed, and whether they have all been estimated using similar assumptions and methods.

Methods Note: Disseminating Economic Evaluations
On the CAP Project Resources page you can find a resource Disseminating Economic Evaluations which provides a few tips about reporting your results to different audiences and lists a variety of venues for sharing cost analysis/CEA results. These include conferences, blog sites, and journals. It includes examples of economic evaluations published at each listed journal.

Methods Note: Assessing an economic evaluation against the Standards for the Economic Evaluation of Educational and Social Programs

To help establish the credibility of your analysis for editors, reviewers, and readers, it may be helpful to discuss the extent to which your study meets the Standards for the Economic Evaluation of Educational and Social Programs. CAP Project provides a CASP Standards Template (on the CAP Project Resources page in the section Getting Started with Cost Analysis) to facilitate this for the cost analysis portion of an economic evaluation. It lists everything the standards recommend should be addressed in a high quality cost analysis and allows you to score your work (or someone else’s) against these standards. In the limitations section of your manuscript or report, you can address how well you met the standards overall and why you were not able to meet some. No one study is likely to meet every standard, often for perfectly justifiable reasons!

You can also use the CASP Standards Template to help you review a manuscript for a journal or a grant proposal. The end-of-module assessment for this module provides you with an opportunity to practice this.