After years of noticing the challenge our students have with fraction operations, we decided to implement a scaffold approach that focuses on using benchmarks to better develop both students' understanding of a fraction as a quantity and their ability to think about fraction operations meaningfully. While we found this approach supported students…

Arrival of managerialism, call for accountability, efficiency and effectiveness marked a new era in higher education. With the growing demand for evidence-based and data-driven analysis of higher education institutions' performance from internal and external stakeholders, universities are looking for ways to successfully implement performance…

Assessing sensitivity to unmeasured confounding is an important step in observational studies, which typically estimate effects under the assumption that all confounders are measured. In this paper, we develop a sensitivity analysis framework for balancing weights estimators, an increasingly popular approach that solves an optimization problem to…

The National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Elementary and Secondary Schools (2012, 2023) (NSBECS) was first developed and is now updated to complement, support, and reach beyond academic and curricula standards to provide schools a roadmap to faith-based education that is governed with integrity and academically, spiritually, and…

Beginning with the 2020-21 school year, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education began collecting literacy screening assessment data from schools and districts participating in certain state grants in order to analyze patterns of performance to inform improvement efforts. These assessments, which were selected from a list…

Alongside primary and secondary education, tertiary education is a critical component of the education ecosystem. Universities' role in strengthening and informing education policy and practice at every level -- training teachers, creating pedagogical content, and leading educational research -- is central to reimagining education to address the…

The Minnesota K-12 Academic Standards in Social Studies represent the work of the Social Studies Standards Review Committee. This committee included K-12 teachers, administrators, college faculty, and representatives of educational and community organizations. Beginning in 2020, the Social Studies Standards Review Committee reviewed the 2011…

Scientific misinformation and disinformation, proliferating via the internet and social media, are now significant problems. Proposed solutions vary substantially. Here, I describe a set of prospective benchmarks--10 competencies--that seem essential for reorienting science education to address the challenge. They include, first, elements of…

To evaluate the fit of a confirmatory factor analysis model, researchers often rely on fit indices such as SRMR, RMSEA, and CFI. These indices are frequently compared to benchmark values of 0.08, 0.06, and 0.96, respectively, established by Hu and Bentler (1999). However, these indices are affected by model characteristics and their sensitivity to…

The recent increase in the number of mathematics museums has given rise to a need for tools with which to design and assess mathematics educational proposals in this non-formal context. This study proposes the use of the van Hiele model, a benchmark in mathematics instruction, for the design of interactive museum models focusing on mathematics…

Reading, writing, and mathematics are widely regarded as foundational academic skills upon which many other academic skills depend. Consequently, each receives a considerable allocation of resources for instruction, assessment, and intervention in K-12 education (Hooper, 2002). An additional indicator of the importance of these skills is the…

The Minnesota K-12 Academic Standards in Mathematics represent the work of the Mathematics Standards Review Committee who, during the 2021-22 school year, reviewed the 2007 Minnesota K-12 Academic Standards in Mathematics, other states' recently revised standards, current academic research, K-12 instructional best practices and public feedback.…

This article offers some general guidelines to social work faculty seeking to be promoted to the rank of Full Professor, guidelines that we hope will provide a beginning discussion for individual programs to develop more transparent criteria and expectations for promotion to the highest rank in the academy. Specifically, we offer guidance about…

Striving for greater English proficiency and securing a job are common goals of newcomers to Canada. For newcomers in the Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada (LINC) program, the Canadian Language Benchmarks (CLB)/Niveaux de competence linguistique canadiens (NCLC) provide an indicator of their abilities and progress in their language…

Empirical growth benchmarks, as introduced by Hill, Bloom, Black, and Lipsey (2008), are a well-known way to contextualize effect sizes in education research. Past work on these benchmarks, both positive and negative, has largely avoided confronting the role of vertical scales, yet technical issues with vertical scales trouble the use of such…