There is much interest in comparing latent traits, such as teacher job satisfaction, in large international surveys. However, different countries respond to questionnaires in different languages and interpret the questions through different cultural lenses, raising doubts about the psychometric equivalence of the measurements. Making valid…

Educational stakeholders are keen to know the magnitude and importance of different interventions. However, the way evidence is communicated to support understanding of the effectiveness of an intervention is controversial. Typically studies in education have used the standardised mean difference as a measure of the impact of interventions. This…

Autistic children and adults who are non-verbal/minimally verbal or have an intellectual disability have often been excluded from Autism Spectrum Disorder research. Historical, practical and theoretical reasons for this exclusion continue to deter some researchers from work with this underserved population. We discuss why these reasons are neither…

This paper considers the model of school effectiveness (SE) currently dominant in research, policy and practice in England (although the concerns it raises are international). It shows, principally through consideration of initial and propagated error, that SE results cannot be relied upon. By considering the residual difference between the…

We consider the effects of daytime fasting by pregnant women during the lunar month of Ramadan on their children's test scores at age seven. Using English register data, we find that scores are 0.05 to 0.08 standard deviations lower for Pakistani and Bangladeshi students exposed to Ramadan in early pregnancy. These estimates are downward biased to…

Describes the development of a two-session home observational scheme for the study of the interactions between mothers and their two- and three-year-old children, with the main thrust on socio-emotional development. The tool focuses on parental responsivity and sensitivity, affect, social communication, and social control and has a combination of…

A survey of 1,720 students in 71 university science laboratory classes in the United States, Canada, England, Australia, Israel, and Nigeria investigated student and teacher perceptions of dimensions of classroom environment (student cohesiveness, open-endedness, integration, rule clarity, material environment). Results and the utility of the…

This document attempts to lay the groundwork for modeling and measuring the "wider benefits" of learning. The introduction distinguishes between two categories of "wider benefits" of learning. The first category is noneconomic benefits (benefits that are not measured directly in terms of additional income or increased…

This document presents the key principles underpinning effective evaluations as applied to policy initiatives in the field of lifelong learning (LL) and the various methods available to implement them. The following are among the topics discussed in Chapters 1-6: (1) the distinction between monitoring, modeling, and evaluation and considerations…