Evaluation is a critical component of continuous improvement in education. Robust evaluations enable engaged parties to determine program and intervention impact on key outcomes, identify areas for improvement, and guide future actions. Additionally, as educational systems increasingly focus on data-driven decisionmaking, evaluation becomes even…

The use of group work projects is common in introductory statistics courses, including projects where students collect their own data. However, the COVID-induced lockdown at the start of 2020 meant that data collection was compromised. In this study, we examine a situation where students were permitted to use artificial (made-up) data for their…

This is the fifth annual report that NZCER has prepared for the Sorted in Schools, Te whai hua--kia ora programme, a financial literacy programme for secondary school students, led by Te Ara Ahunga Ora Retirement Commission. In 2024, our focus is to explore how Sorted in Schools is used and valued in English-medium educational settings. We used a…

Employment and training services offered through Extension are part of and continue a long tradition of policy-focused employment and job training. This paper chronicles the successes of UT Extension's work as a third-party partner in the delivery of workforce development programming geared toward individuals receiving Supplemental Nutrition…

As federal guidelines have increased reporting demands on all sectors of education (United States Department of Education [USDOE], 2015) and state reporting requirements have expanded as legislatures call for performance-based funding (National Conference of State Legislatures, 2015), the need for institutional research offices has become the norm…

We propose an innovative, effective, and data-agnostic method to train a deep-neural network model with an extremely small training dataset, called VELR (Voting-based Ensemble Learning with Rejection). In educational research and practice, providing valid labels for a sufficient amount of data to be used for supervised learning can be very costly…

This is the fourth annual evaluation report for the Sorted in Schools, Te whai hua -- kia ora programme, a financial literacy programme for secondary school students and akonga, led by Te Ara Ahunga Ora Retirement Commission. In 2023, the evaluation focused on collecting data about key programme goals and reporting on the proportion of schools and…

The current study examines trajectories of treatment outcomes 6 months after completion of a peer parent program, "NAMI Basics." Fifty-two caregivers who were part of a larger trial completed questionnaires prior to, immediately after, and 6 months after completing "NAMI Basics." Growth curve models were used to examine…

One of the biggest challenges that states and local intermediaries face in setting up and scaling high-quality youth apprenticeships is gathering relevant, accurate and actionable data. High-quality data is an essential ingredient for a strong youth apprenticeship program because it equips state and local leaders to evaluate impact, monitor…

Commonly used machine learning applications seem to relate to big data. This article provides a gentle review of machine learning and shows why machine learning can be applied to small data too. An example of applying machine learning to screen irregularity reports is presented. In the example, the support vector machine and multinomial naïve…

The Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU) launched the "Powered by Publics: Scaling Student Success" initiative in the fall of 2018. The South Eastern Cluster brought together a diverse set of institutions from this region of the country that included several of the larger universities, the North Carolina System…

This dissertation examines the efficacy of a professional development program in developing data literate and culturally proficient community college instructors. Existing research suggests that there is a need for high-quality professional development in Cultural Proficiency and data literacy for community college instructors to make continuous…

The "Examining Implementation and Outcomes of the Project On-Track High-Dosage Literacy Tutoring Program" study describes the characteristics of students who participated in a full year of Project On-Track, a high-dosage, small-group literacy tutoring program for students in grade 1-3. Its online adaptive program, Amplify Reading, groups…

A high number of cyber breaches in organizations occur as a result of email phishing attempts. Research has shown that cyber education has a positive impact in user awareness of attack methods resulting in the reduction of compromises from email phishing attempts. However, in some instances, cyber education does not have a positive impact on the…

Data-based decision making (DBDM) is presumed to improve student performance in elementary schools in all subjects. The majority of studies in which DBDM effects have been evaluated have focused on mathematics. A hierarchical multiple single-subject design was used to measure effects of a 2-year training, in which entire school teams learned how…