If students cannot express themselves in the language of the assessor, and if the assessor is not familiar with the cultural constraints within which students operate, it is difficult for the assessor to collect evidence of adequate performance. This article describes the assessment of three digital artefacts where the assessor strove to…

There is already a growing literature on assessment and an emergent scholarship that people in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) community need both to promote and to build on if assessment is to be a scholarly activity. Awareness alone, however, is unlikely to be enough. The poor practice highlighted in this article is not simply…

This paper examines whether educational production in secondary school involves joint production among teachers across subjects. In doing so, it also provides insights into the reliability of value-added modeling. Teacher value-added to reading test scores is estimated for four different teacher types: English, math, science, and social studies.…

Despite having drawn from empirical evidence and cumulative prior expertise in the formulation of research questions as well as study design, each study is treated as a stand-alone product rather than positioned within a sequence of cumulative evidence. While results of prior studies are typically cited within the body of prior literature review,…

Drug studies are often cited as the best exemplars of evaluation design. However, many of these studies are seriously biased in favor of positive findings for the drugs evaluated, even to the point where dangerous effects are hidden. In spite of using randomized designs and double blinding, drug companies have found ways of producing the results…

Methodologists have written for years about the importance of attending to important details in quantitative research, yet there has been little research investigating methodological practice in the social sciences. This study assessed the extent to which innovations and practices are adopted by researchers voluntarily. In particular, I use the…

This article addresses ethical dilemmas experienced by street-level research and evaluation workers recruiting and gathering data in community-based research projects. The authors focus on a subgroup of street-level research workers, whom they call research extenders (REs), employed because they share important characteristics with the target…

The injustices of "allowing certain people to succeed, based not upon merit but upon the cultural experiences, the social ties and the economic resources they have access to, often remains unacknowledged in the broader society" (Wacquant, 1998, p. 216). Cognizant of this, the authors argue that education requires researchers' renewed examination…

The conduct of fieldwork is an adventure, a voyage into the unknown. The author has several times had the opportunity to reflect on his fieldwork, which was most often conducted among remote Indigenous groups, initially in Australia and then wider afield in Thailand, the Philippines, and Africa. He is struck by the significant amount of time,…

Phrenologists believed that specific brain regions corresponded to certain character traits. In addition, the size of each brain region was believed to determine the strength of the respective trait. Phrenology originated in Austria with Franz Josef Gall and was popularized and commercialized in America at the end of the 19th century by Orson…

Although experiments are viewed as the gold standard for evaluation, some of their benefits may be lost when, as is common, outcomes are not defined for some sample members. In evaluations of marriage interventions, for example, a key outcome--relationship quality--is undefined when a couple splits up. This article shows how treatment-control…

This case study describes efforts to promote collaborative research across traditional boundaries in a business-oriented university as part of an institutional transformation. We model this activity within the framework of social network analysis and use quantitative tools from that field to characterize resulting impacts. (Contains 4 tables and 2…

In "Utilization Focused Evaluation" (1997), Patton introduced the term "process use" to describe changes in thinking and behavior, whether at the individual, program, or organizational level, as a result of one's participation in an evaluation, irrespective of the evaluation results. In conversations with stakeholders, Patton found that although…

This article evaluates PISA 2000 as a resource for providing information on educational attainment and inequality, focusing on France and England. Going beyond pupils' performance, it assesses levels of educational inequality by examining distributions of scores and the relationship between socio-economic status and performance. This review raises…

This article addresses the issue of falling response rates in telephone surveys. To better understand and maintain respondent goodwill, concepts of psychological contract and respondent expectations are introduced and explored. Results of the qualitative study show that respondent expectations are not only socially contingent but also…