The search for necessary and sufficient causes of some outcome of interest, referred to as "configurational comparative research," has long been one of the main preoccupations of evaluation scholars and practitioners. However, only the last three decades have witnessed the evolution of a set of formal methods that are sufficiently…

Effective assessment practice requires clearly defining and operationalizing terminology. We illustrate the importance of this practice by focusing on academic "undermatching"--when students enroll in colleges that are less academically selective than those for which they are academically prepared. Undermatching has been viewed as a…

Karabatsos compared the power of 36 person-fit statistics using receiver operating characteristics curves and found the "H[superscript T]" statistic to be the most powerful in identifying aberrant examinees. He found three statistics, "C", "MCI", and "U3", to be the next most powerful. These four statistics,…

In a recent contribution to "Sociological Methods & Research," Baumgartner and Epple (B&E) employ Coincidence Analysis (CNA) to explain the outcome of the vote on the Swiss minaret initiative of 2009. Although the authors also present a substantive argument, their principal objective is to prove the superiority of CNA over…

Teacher effectiveness varies substantially, yet principals' evaluations of teachers often fail to differentiate performance among teachers. We offer new evidence on principals' subjective evaluations of their teachers' effectiveness using two sources of data from a large, urban district: principals' high-stakes personnel evaluations of teachers,…

Cost-effectiveness analysis is rarely used in education. When it is used, it often fails to meet methodological standards, especially with regard to cost measurement. Although there are occasional criticisms of these failings, we believe that it is useful to provide a listing of the more common concerns and how they might be addressed. Based upon…

Some universal behavioural screening processes require classroom teachers to complete a risk assessment measure on each student in their class, leading to a possible, but unexplored, problem: risk assessment scores may be influenced by the teacher completing the measure. The current study investigated whether teacher-reported risk assessment…

Objective: This article describes the evaluation of permanency roundtables, an intervention to help youth in foster care achieve legal permanency and the challenges evaluators faced in finding and using appropriate comparison data. Method: In 2009, permanency roundtables were conducted for 496 children in Georgia, most of whom had spent extended…

Sustainable Development Goals call on Members States to "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" and sets a number of targets related to technical and vocational education and training (TVET). In order to collect input from the global TVET community, UNESCO-UNEVOC organized a…

Korea has used three different teacher evaluation systems since the 1960s: teacher performance rating, teacher performance-based pay and teacher evaluation for professional development. A number of studies have focused on an analysis of each evaluation system in terms of its advent, development, advantages and disadvantages, but these studies have…

Black and Hispanic students are undeniably underidentified as gifted and underrepresented in gifted education. The underrepresentation of the two largest groups of "minority" students is long-standing, dating several decades, and is a serious area of contention. Most debates focus on the efficacy of traditional intelligence tests with…

This report describes the implementation of professional development (PD) reforms and efforts to use teacher effectiveness (TE) data to inform PD through the third year of the initiative for all seven sites: Hillsborough County Public Schools (HCPS), Shelby County Schools (SCS, formerly Memphis City Schools), Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), and…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) was designed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to evaluate the quality, equity, and efficiency of school systems around the world. Specifically, the PISA has assessed 15-year-old students' reading, mathematics, and science literacy on a 3-year cycle, since…

This commentary examines the role of the unit from the perspective of the definition of measurement in physics as the ratio of two magnitudes, one of which is defined as the unit; it is an important and timely contribution to measurement in the social sciences. There are many different points that could be commented upon, but the author will…

When lotteries are infeasible, researchers must rely on observational methods to estimate charter effectiveness at raising student test scores. Considerable attention has been paid to observational studies by the Stanford Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which have analyzed charter performance in 27 states. However, the…