In the USA, trends in educational accountability have driven several models attempting to provide quality data for decision making at the national, state, and local levels, regarding the success of schools in meeting standards for competence. Statistical methods to generate data for such decisions have generally included (a) status models that…

Education officials and journalists frequently track changes over time in the average ACT® College Readiness Assessment Composite scores and ACT College Readiness Benchmark attainment rates of individual high schools. Using standard statistical methods, I examined how often changes in these statistics are unambiguously positive or negative, rather…

In 2010, HCM Strategists received support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to engage academic researchers in identifying and discussing the best currently available ways to account for differences in college "inputs"--students, resources, and fixed characteristics--when evaluating postsecondary outcomes. The project, Context…

Despite questions about validity and reliability, the use of value-added estimation methods has moved beyond academic research into state accountability systems for teachers, schools, and teacher preparation programs (TPPs). Prior studies of value-added measurement for TPPs test the validity of researcher-designed models and find that measuring…

The importance of higher education has never been clearer. Educational attainment--the number of years a person spends in school--strongly predicts adult earnings, as well as health and civic engagement. Yet relative to other developed nations, educational attainment in the United States is lagging, with young Americans who heretofore led the…

A hallmark of the US education system is the opportunity afforded to students to pursue education and career paths of their own choosing. This flexibility and autonomy, however, has drawbacks. Students must navigate a series of complex and often disconnected environments, as well as numerous decision points, before they attain a fulfilling career.…

The current U.S. federal mandate for educational accountability requires state departments of education to collect data on the postschool employment and postsecondary school and/or training enrollment of young adults with disabilities. To examine how these data have been collected, we conducted a literature synthesis of follow-up and follow-along…

This article discusses how to make process use an independent variable in evaluation practice: the purposeful means of building an organization's capacity to conduct and use evaluations in the long run. The goal of evaluation capacity building (ECB) is to strengthen and sustain effective program evaluation practices through a number of activities:…

Currently, there has been substantial interest, in Australia and internationally, in policy activities related to outcomes-based educational performance indicators and their link with growing demands for accountability of teachers and schools. In order to achieve a fair comparison between schools, it is commonly agreed that a correction should be…

Institutional accountability for performance and quality is an evolving topic with immeasurable appeal. Data and sources are abundant, but validated measures and meaningful information are scarce. While pursuing an approach centered on construct validity, this study transforms complex data into useful information. Correlation analysis reveals…