Students should be exposed to open-ended, complex design challenges during their courses to better prepare the students for the design challenges that they will encounter during their careers. This preparation may be achieved by combining flipped classroom instruction, case based learning in an active classroom, and authentic assessments. Between…

In postsecondary research, comprehensive approaches to student success (CASS) programs are shown to have the greatest impact on student outcomes. At the core of a CASS program is personalized and proactive coaching in which coaches actively reach out to students and meet to discuss personal and academic issues. MDRC's evaluation of one CASS…

College students in the 21st century face unprecedented levels of stress, which has led to a global and deleterious impact on their mental health. The mental health of college students is widely considered to be a public health crisis according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and universities are challenged to provide adequate resources…

How much should student effort matter in their course grades? How much does student effort actually matter? What is the link between student effort and student performance, especially when the effort is not specifically focused on a specific performance metric? This paper examines these questions normatively as well as by analyzing student data…

New challenges in education demand effective solutions. Although Learning Analytics (LA), Educational Data Mining (EDM) and the use of Big Data are often presented as a panacea, there is a lot of ground to be covered in order for the EDM to answer the real questions of educators. An important step toward this goal is to implement holistic…

This article advocates for investments in curriculum and in coaching to support the work of teachers. It recommends coherent systems of professional learning to include active work with curriculum before it is used and support from coaches during use. To facilitate this work, the author provides a theory of change to move from curriculum and…

Whereas social support contributes to individual vitality and academic performance, the theoretical process through which social support promotes performance, and for whom it is most beneficial in this respect, remain open questions. We developed a conceptual model in which social support influences academic performance by promoting vitality,…

More and more governments have started to introduce elements of performance in the funding mechanisms for their higher education institutions. An example is a performance agreement: a contract signed between the funding authority and an individual higher education provider. In the Netherlands, a policy experiment involving performance agreements…

The Washington State Board of Education (SBE) issues an annual report to the Governor, the Legislature, and the public, in accordance with the Charter School Act, RCW 28A.710.250. The statute requires the annual charter school report to include the following: (1) The performance of the state's charter schools during the prior school year,…

The Performance Measures for Student Success Report is the North Carolina Community College System's major accountability document. This annual performance report is based on data compiled during the previous year and serves to inform colleges and the public on the performance of North Carolina's 58 community colleges. In 2010, a review process…

Students in the physical sciences--physics and chemistry--often take multiple-choice exams for introductory courses. Some students will write a lot on their exams, while others write very little. Does the student doing more scratch work on their exam perform better than one who does not write as much? We analyzed multiple-choice exams in physics…

The Performance Measures for Student Success Report is the North Carolina Community College System's major accountability document. This annual performance report is based on data compiled during the previous year and serves to inform colleges and the public on the performance of our 58 community colleges. In 2010, a review process was established…

Strong teacher and principal evaluation systems have the potential to help teachers and principals improve their practice, to exit teachers who are perennially ineffective, to retain teachers who are effective and learn from them, and to increase the overall quality of a district's teacher workforce. As states respond to widespread concerns (both…

STEM education plays a critical role in preparing individuals for the challenges of a rapidly evolving technological world. This paper explores various methods for evaluating and improving STEM education to ensure its effectiveness and relevance in contemporary society. The methods discussed include teacher training and professional development,…

In this paper, we examine the effect of computer-assisted learning on students' long-term development. We explore the implementation of the "largest ed-tech intervention in the world to date," which connected China's best teachers to more than 100 million rural students through satellite internet. We find evidence that exposure to the…