Social return on investment (SROI) offers a new strategy to measure and communicate the value of outcomes achieved by programs that provide social, health, and education services to children and their families. It can be a powerful tool for demonstrating the monetary value of programs and services and for communicating that value in a way that can…

Social return on investment (SROI) analysis offers a practical new approach for measuring and communicating the value of outcomes achieved by programs that provide social, health, and educational services to children and their families. This guide highlights the key steps in conducting SROI research, issues in data-gathering and analysis, as well…

School accountability is subject to considerable scrutiny. It generates sharp political debate, policy challenges, and continuous discussion. Growth models are now a part of that discussion. To many practitioners the sheer volume of "important to know" information is daunting. The members of the Technical Issues in Large Scale Assessment…

This guide gives middle school teachers and principals the tools they need to get answers to their questions about program evaluation. It shows how to use the information to work more effectively and efficiently and explains how to use program evaluation techniques to make sure that the approaches selected really solve the problems of interest.…

Addresses issues of students' understandings of representative values of data--how representative values should be introduced, and what role student understanding of representative values plays in their ability to analyze sets of data. Highlights the importance of teacher support of student development of conceptual understandings of multiple…

Describes an investigation that focuses on comparing data sets by using data on 37 brands of peanut butter and their quality ratings. (ASK)

Presents different real-world mathematics activities on data display and data analysis with pie charts from different time periods. (ASK)

Presents a hands-on activity in which students use the tools to derive the basic procedure used by wildlife biologists worldwide for estimating the sizes of wildlife populations. Helps students gain the feelings of power and ownership of a statistical method that they derive themselves. (ASK)

Describes exploratory data analysis activities using packages of M&M candies and graphing results using object graphs, picture graphs, symbolic graphs, circle graphs, relative-frequency bar graphs, and stacked bar graphs. Also discusses pooling data and assessing reasonableness of results. (MKR)

Compares and presents information on the history of journalism. Presents three activities that encourage analysis and making predictions based on data gathered from articles in newspapers. (ASK)

Presents an activity that introduces the historical developments in science that led to the discovery of the periodic table and lets students experience scientific discovery firsthand. Enables students to learn about patterns among the elements and experience how scientists analyze data to discover patterns and build models. (JRH)

Describes the work of a meteorologist, the history of meteorology, and links to mathematics. Contains reproducible student activity worksheets on weather data. (MKR)

An example of real-world data is used to introduce comprehensible and visual images of the data and their attributes and relationships. Stem-and-leaf plots, box-and-whisker plots, and scattergrams are used to encourage prompt recognition of data characteristics and to effect appropriate interpretations and inferences. (JJK)

Describes an activity for helping students understand and use data tables. (PR)

Presents a game called Push-Penny, played by pushing a coin and having it land on a line, used to teach students to develop intuitive feelings for the consequences of randomness, including data handling and the construction and use of tables and graphs. (ASK)