Track A training sessions

Gretchen Donehower (email) reported on the Track A sessions, which offered training on the NTA methodology. She suggested that any participants with questions should email her.

NTA training is easier now with the manual, but two and one-half days is a short period in which to cover the full methodology. It is helpful if participants read the manual in advance and have clear instructions on what data to bring. For this purpose, participants should be notified at least two months in advance of the training sessions.

Tim Miller suggested that it would be useful to develop an on-line course, but it would be a big project, requiring substantial funding. Meanwhile, the PowerPoint training presentations are available on the NTA website, and it might be possible to videotape the next training session.

It would be useful to redesign the training manual as an e-book. It would also be very useful to translate the manual into Spanish and Portguese.

Participants commented that training sessions might devote less time to concepts and more to hands-on work, using a good data set as an example.

Teaching is needed on how to make and update time series, so NTA data can move toward multiple cross sections.

We need improved methods for integrating data from more than one country in order to make commparisons and draw policy implications.

Finally, now that the new manual is available, we need to clean the old methodology out of the werbsite and replace it with the manual.