Treatment fidelity data are critical to evaluate intervention effectiveness, yet there are only general guidelines regarding treatment fidelity measurement. Initial investigations have found treatment fidelity data collected via direct observation to be more reliable than data collected via permanent product or self-report. However, the comparison…

Objective: After the discontinuation of School Health Policies and Practices Study (SHPPS) in 2016, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began exploring innovative ways to gather school health information using existing surveillance systems. School Health Profiles (Profiles) is a school-based system of surveys that monitors…

Recent methods have sought to improve precision in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) by utilizing data from large observational datasets for covariate adjustment. For example, consider an RCT aimed at evaluating a new algebra curriculum, in which a few dozen schools are randomly assigned to treatment (new curriculum) or control (standard…

It is unknown how health services staff (school nurse or school physician) or school characteristics are associated with the number of services provided for chronic health conditions in schools. Using data from the 2014 School Health Policies and Practices Study, four services (identification or school-based management, tracking, case management,…

During the 2014-2015 academic year, WestEd hired us as research interns at the West Comprehensive Center in Phoenix, AZ. As PhD students, our task was to conduct a collective case study on two local education agencies in Arizona that participated in a 2-year school turnaround specialist program. The goal of the project was to gain a deeper…

Schools are at the forefront of the institutions that need to be in close relations with the social environment. In this regard, practices of the public relations are prominent. This obligation is also responsibility of the school principals, as there are no public relations units in public schools. The purpose of this research is to reveal the…

Over the past decade, chronic absence has gone from being a virtually unknown concept to a national education metric that provides every school in the nation with critical data on how many students are missing so many days of school it jeopardizes their academic success. The inclusion of chronic absence in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) was…

An exploratory case study is presented in which social network analysis (SNA) was used to explore how school teaming structures influence the implementation of School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS). The authors theorized that PBIS leadership teams that include members with connections to all other information-sharing…

Middle school is an important phase in the academic trajectory, which plays a major role in the path to successful post-secondary outcomes such as going to college. Despite this, research on factors leading to college-going choices do not yet utilize the extensive fine-grained data now becoming available on middle school learning and engagement.…

Many researchers have documented the difficulties for learners of different ages and preparations in understanding basic astronomical concepts. Traditional instructional strategies and communication media do not seem to be effective in producing meaningful understanding, or even induce misconceptions and misinterpretations. In line with recent…

A critical component of science and math education is reasoning with data. Science textbooks are instructional tools that provide opportunities for learning science content (e.g. facts about force and motion) and process skills (e.g. data recording) that support and augment reasoning with data. In addition, the construction and design of textbooks…

Response-to-intervention (RTI) systems posit that Tier 1 consists of high-quality general classroom instruction using evidence-based methods to address the needs of most students. However, data on the extent to which general education teachers provide such instruction are rarely collected. This missing instructional data problem may result in RTI…

The implementation of school-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports (SWPBIS) has been shown to reduce behavioral incidents and lead to more positive school climates. Despite the growing popularity in schools, there lacks clear understanding of the school counselor role in this approach. We present the perspectives of an elementary…

The field of learning analytics is rapidly developing techniques for using data captured during online learning. In this article, we develop an additional application: the use of analytics for improving implementation fidelity in a randomized controlled efficacy trial. In an efficacy trial, the goal is to determine whether an innovation has a…

This article describes original research to determine reasons graduate students do not complete requirements for a Master's (M.Ed.) in Middle Level Education degree at the Southeastern University. Since the program's initial cohort the graduation rate has decreased. Program faculty was concerned about the increasing difference between the number…