As frequent consumers and disseminators of research, school psychologists have an ethical obligation to critically evaluate the findings of studies (National Association of School Psychologists, 2010); however, this can feel burdensome when studies are behind paywalls and require hours to properly scrutinize. Particularly when studies utilizing…

Group design research studies can provide evidence to draw conclusions about "what works," "for whom," and "under what conditions" in special education. The quality indicators introduced by Gersten and colleagues (2005) have contributed to increased rigor in group design research, which has provided substantial…

Reviews of research in special education have a unique place in the scientific literature, with the potential to inform a broad audience about the effectiveness and acceptability of assessment and intervention strategies for a heterogeneous group of children and youth. Results from reviews are useful to school leaders, practitioners, parents,…

The calls for accountability in higher education have made outcome-based assessment a key accreditation component. Accreditation remains a well-regarded seal of approval on college quality, and requires the programme to set clear, appropriate, and measurable goals and courses to attain them. Furthermore, programmes must demonstrate that…

This article is a follow-up to a previous article, "Six Ways to Increase Enrollments at an Extended Campus," published in this journal (vol. 17, no. 4, winter 2015), wherein a seventh best practice to increase course offerings and increase enrollments at an extended campus is presented. This best practice seeks to identify those areas of…

In 1916 Robert Frost published his famous poem, "The Road Not Taken," in which he muses about what might have been had he chosen a different path, made a different choice. While counterfactual arguments in general can often lead to vacuous nowheres, frequently in statistics the data that are not presented actually exist, in a sense,…

Colleges and universities are increasingly being held accountable for assessing and reporting student learning. Recently there has been increased focus on using assessment to improve learning over time. In this paper we present a simple, step-by-step assessment process that will deliver meaningful results to achieve these ends. We emphasize the…

Purpose: Linking Open Data (LOD) provides a vast amount of well structured semantic information, but many inconsistencies may occur, especially if the data are generated with the help of automated methods. Data cleansing approaches enable detection of inconsistencies and overhauling of affected data sets, but they are difficult to apply…

This paper describes a model proven to be effective for assessing and documenting evidence of student learning outcomes. Specifically, it will share a model, F.A.M.O.U.S. Copyright ©2008, which is an acronym exemplifying six effective steps for complying with institutional accountability and eternal assessment requirements proscribed by the…

Smaller universities may produce research which is on a par with larger, elite establishments. This is confirmed by a recently developed mathematical model, supported by data from British and French higher education research-evaluation exercises. The detailed nature of the UK system, in particular, allows quantification of the notion of critical…

Specifying the criteria of a rubric to assess an activity, establishing the different quality levels of proficiency of development and defining weights for every criterion is not as easy as one a priori might think. Besides, the complexity of these tasks increases when they involve more than one lecturer. Reaching an agreement about the criteria…

This book is based on the author's 20-plus years of consulting with school districts and other educational organizations in designing, piloting, and training educators in the use of teacher-performance evaluation systems. Its primary purpose is to help both teachers and their evaluators collect more comprehensive and accurate assessment data for…

Education leaders and much literature exhort teachers and school leaders to use data more often and more effectively to guide planning and decision making--called, "data driven decision making." This term is ubiquitous in literature and reform discourse, but "on the ground," so to speak, practitioners face significant challenges in analyzing,…

Today, the term "quality" cannot be used without evidence--evidence of learning for teacher candidates, and evidence that these teachers impact their young learners. In response to this call for evidence, teacher education programs are currently developing assessment systems that emphasize the analysis of data to make educational decisions about…

How can the average educator who teaches online, without experience in evaluating emerging technologies, build on what is successful and modify what is not? Written for educators who feel ill-prepared when required to evaluate e-learning initiatives, "Evaluating e-Learning" offers step-by-step guidance for conducting an evaluation plan of…