With the push for evidence-informed policy and practice, schools and policy makers are now increasingly encouraged and supported to use and enagage with research evidence. This means that consumers of research will now need to be discerning in judging the quality of research evidence that will inform their decisions. This paper evaluates the…

The practice of homeschooling still receives contrasting responses on its relevancy and effectiveness. The current study is aimed to map the trends in the selected eleven studies from various educational journals. The analysis focuses on mapping the trends on: a) research settings, b) target sample, c) method or instrument used, d) common focus or…

As evidence-based reform becomes increasingly important in educational policy, it is becoming essential to understand how research design might contribute to reported effect sizes in experiments evaluating educational programs. The purpose of this study was to examine how methodological features such as types of publication, sample sizes, and…

The continuously growing demand for program results has produced an increased need for evaluation capacity building (ECB). The "Integrative ECB Model" was developed to integrate concepts from existing ECB theory literature and to structure a synthesis of the empirical ECB literature. The study used a broad-based research synthesis method with…

Background/Context: School finance litigation has often prompted funding reforms, but what happens as a result is the subject of considerable dispute. Purpose: This article explores design problems encountered in studies examining the nature and effects of those reforms. Analysis: After describing the development and current status of school…

Although the general conceptual basis appeared far earlier, theory-driven evaluation came to prominence only a few decades ago with the appearance of Chen's 1990 book "Theory-Driven Evaluations." Since that time, the approach has attracted many supporters as well as detractors. In this paper, 45 cases of theory-driven evaluations, published over a…

This article addresses a void in the literature about social work research and evaluation (R&E) designs, in particular related to the quality of its published work. Data were collected by reviewing three empirically oriented journals, "Research on Social Work Practice", "Journal of Social Service Research", and "Social Work Research" over three…

Business students are increasingly seeking international experience in short-term, study abroad programs to enhance their intercultural knowledge, intercultural communication skills, and global perspectives to be more competitive in the global arena. Intuitively, universities initiating these programs and the students sojourning abroad believe in…

In this article we give a systematic review of the nature and design of earlier research into the impact of instructional development in higher education. Studies are clustered on the basis of the level of outcome that was measured, meaning that another synthesis technique is used than in prior reviews related to the same topic. In addition, we…

This article argues with a literature review that a simplistic distinction between strong and weak evidence hinged on the use of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the federal "gold standard" for generating rigorous evidence on social programs and policies, is not tenable with evaluative studies of complex, field interventions such as…

In no-difference research, no differences are found among groups or conditions. This article summarizes the existing commentary on such research. The characteristics of no-difference research, its acceptance by the research community, strategies for conducting such studies, and its centrality within the experimental and nonexperimental paradigms…

This applied dissertation described the evaluation of a program designed to provide students with the necessary academic and social skills needed to matriculate and graduate from the university. The problem was that there was no evidence of a formalized program evaluation to determine if the Academic Empowerment Center (AEC) was effective in…

This paper focuses on transition programs for youth to postsecondary education, broadly considered. It addresses the following questions: (1) What models or programs of transition exist? (2) On what basis can we say one transition program is more effective than another? In other words, how is successful transition defined? (3) How are…

A model is described which illustrates two general uses of multiple analyses to evaluate quasi-experiments: obtaining estimates of the treatment effect, and checking the validity of the experiment. (MH)

Reviewed research on practicum supervision in terms of findings and research designs employed. Classified research according to counselor-supervisor similarity, training methods, and evaluation. Conclusions indicated no support for supervisor-counselor matching, support for experiential, modeling and didatic methods, and peer supervision. (Author)