Practitioners of adult education have a long history of teaching for social change. They may, however, be uncomfortable using quantitative methods to assess the impact of their learning activities, or they might lack access to statistical analysis software. Quantitative methods help the practitioner determine whether behavioral or attitudinal…

The transition from high school to adulthood is difficult for youth with autism spectrum disorder and their families. Recognizing these challenges, there is a small but emerging body of literature testing interventions to improve the transition process. But there are many challenges in performing intervention research that have yet to be fully…

High-quality, evidence-based professional development is essential to ensure that teachers obtain the knowledge, strategies and skills necessary to positively impact student learning. While the primary form of professional development, training has rarely been evaluated for quality beyond the satisfaction of those being trained. The Observation…

This chapter describes international policy contexts of adult literacy and language assessment and the shift toward standardization through measurement tools. It considers the implications the quantification of learning outcomes has for pedagogy and practice and for the social inclusion of transnational migrants.

Evaluation occurs within a specific context and is influenced by the economic, political, historical, and social forces that shape that context. The culture of evaluation is thus very much embedded in the culture of accountability that currently prevails in public sector institutions, policies, and program. As such, our understanding of the…

When planning and evaluating community-level initiatives focused on policy and environment change, it is useful to have estimates of the impact on behavioral outcomes of particular strategies (e.g., building a new walking trail to promote physical activity). We have created a measure of estimated strategy-level impact--"population dose"--based on…

Sound evaluation planning requires numerous decisions about how constructs in a program theory will be translated into measures and instruments that produce evaluation data. This article, the first in a dialogue exchange, examines how decisions about measurement are (and should be) made, especially in the context of small-scale local program…

Consistent with the dictum, "the personal is political," feminist scholars have maintained that gender equity in security, access to education, economic opportunity, and property ownership are central to women's well-being. Empirical research evaluating this thesis can include nation-level indicators of gender equity, such as the United Nation…

There has been an exponential growth in assessment methods to diagnose disorders on the autism spectrum. Many reasons for this trend exist and include advancing knowledge on how to make a diagnosis, the heterogeneity of the spectrum, the realization that different methods may be needed based on age and intellectual disability. Other factors…

Life values, value orientations, social attitudes, and other corresponding social collisions have been the object of many studies. Research on the values of youth in Russia is marred by methodological problems that have not been adequately addressed, and more careful approaches show that there may not be a finite list of values that are held and…

As all physicists know, all units are arbitrary. The numbering system is anthropocentric; for example, the Celsius scale of temperature has 100 degrees between the boiling point of water at STP and the freezing point of water. The number 100 is chosen because human beings have 10 fingers. The best units might be based on physical constants, for…

"Training" magazine taps 2011 Training Top 125 winners to provide their learning and development best practices in each issue. This article looks at strategies for aligning training with business goals and creating models to measure return-on-investment (ROI) and other financial metrics pertaining to training.

This article describes why measurement invariance is a critical issue to quantitative theory building within the field of human resource development. Readers will learn what measurement invariance is and how to test for its presence using techniques that are accessible to applied researchers. Using data from a LibQUAL+[TM] study of user…

Blended learning is a diverse and expanding area of design and inquiry that combines face-to-face and online modalities. As blended learning research matures, numerous voices enter the conversation. This study begins the search for the center of this emerging area of study by finding the most cited scholarship on blended learning. Using Harzing's…

Educational disadvantage is an essentially contested, political concept. At the same time there is a "phoney consensus" surrounding the issue, i.e., policy debates on the topic often fail to reflect this contestation. This lack of awareness of the political context to the debate is evident in relation to the targets and measures set for…