The "Effect of School Report Card Design on Usability, Understanding, and Satisfaction" study examined the District of Columbia Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) online school report card. The study assessed the effect of different designs on how easy the report cards are to use and understand, how easy it is to find…

The set of appendices in this volume is a companion to the report "Federal Efforts Towards Investing in Innovation in Education Through the i3 Fund: A Summary of Grantmaking and Evidence-Building." The goal of the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) was to build high-quality evidence about effective…

Traditional methods for conducting performance evaluations of academic courses are somewhat limited in that they are unable to account for both quantitative and qualitative data. For example, the data used to assess student performance in a typical industrial design course are generally complex, multi-criteria, multi-variable, and frequently vague…

A new design-based theory has recently been developed to estimate impacts for randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and basic quasi-experimental designs (QEDs) for a wide range of designs used in social policy research (Imbens & Rubin, 2015; Schochet, 2016). These methods use the potential outcomes framework and known features of study designs…

Empirical Education Inc. is the independent evaluator of SRI International's 2014 Investing in Innovation (i3) Development grant called Redesigning Secondary Courses to Improve Academic Outcomes for Adolescents with Disabilities and Other Underperforming Adolescents. The goal of the grant is to develop "Enhanced Units" that combine…

In previous research the "Joan Ganz Cooney Center" and "New America" have characterized the children's educational app market as a "Digital Wild West" (Guernsey, Levine, Chiong & Severns, 2012; Shuler, 2011). The marketplace is chock full of choices but lacks essential information to aid parents' and educators'…

This paper reports the results of a survey and follow-up interviews that were administered to instructors of the undergraduate systems analysis and design course, a core course of the Information Systems curriculum. The goal of this research was to learn if the background of the instructor, in terms of industry experience, affects the purpose and…

As colleges increasingly understand the importance of intentionally engaging students, the field must turn to the game-changing challenge: "bringing high-impact practices to scale as part of a concerted effort to increase college completion rates." In an era of growing demand, shrinking budgets, and greater accountability, meeting this…

Reports the results of a survey on the design, development, production, and utilization of media in business training programs. In-house production is described, as well as the types of media most used by corporations, problems with outside vendors, and future directions of media development. (BK)

In May 2005, the International Technology Education Association (ITEA) was funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to develop curricular units for Grades K-12 on Space Exploration. The units focus on aspects of the themes that NASA Engineers and Scientists--as well as future generations of explorers--must consider, such…