Defining and measuring success are not merely process steps, but critical conversations that shape how education is understood and delivered. They influence how individuals within and outside the system perceive the goals of education. They shape the incentives for stakeholders seeking to improve educational outcomes. Methods of measuring success…

The long-term goal of the State Systemic Improvement Plan (SSIP) and other federal and state early intervention and early childhood education initiatives is improved child and family outcomes. States play a critical role in supporting practitioners in the use of evidence-based practices to improve child and family outcomes. When practitioners…

Higher education has made impressive progress concerning student learning outcomes assessment practices. Yet--despite the assumption that better assessment would lead to better student learning--few examples of demonstrable student learning improvement exist at the academic degree or university levels. In 2014 Fulcher, Good, Coleman, and Smith…

This year's Action Guide examines the need for new ways of measuring student success. Academic test scores are just one method of measuring student progress, offering an incomplete picture of student learning and growth. Educators and state leaders recognize that serving all students well requires focusing on their individual needs, including…

Purpose: The main aim of this paper is to develop guidelines on the critical issues to consider in research design in an action research (AR) environment for SME network capability development. Design/methodology/approach: The issues in research design for AR studies are developed from the authors' experience in running learning sets but, in…

Educational disparities are frequently framed in racial comparisons that are based on data generated by sorting and counting racial subgroups. Our reliance on these data, and the sorting and counting mechanisms entailed therein, is fundamental to debates about racial inequalities. What is largely ignored in achievement gap discourse is how racial…

The Census Bureau has historically grouped high school diploma holders along with those who hold "high school equivalent" credentials. Among these is the credential earned through successfully passing the General Education Development (GED) test. Interest in identifying those with GEDs has recently increased, in part from debate within…

Curriculum-based measurement of oral reading (CBM-R) is frequently used to set student goals and monitor student progress. This study examined the quality of growth estimates derived from CBM-R progress monitoring data. The authors used a linear mixed effects regression (LMER) model to simulate progress monitoring data for multiple levels of…

This article responds to recent UK proposals on measuring and recording student achievement (Universities UK 2007) to highlight issues that are relevant across different higher education contexts, which are increasingly intertwined through the expansion of the Bologna process. Drawing from wide-ranging literature on assessment and sociology, this…

During SY 2011-2012, the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) continued their efforts to improve the validity and reliability of data reporting. BIE data collections are dependent on school level entry (self-reporting) into the Native American Student Information System (NASIS) or into the BIE's Annual Report from the schools. In addition, data…

Three conceptual issues form the basis for coping with technical problems of gathering data on literacy: (1) the definition of literacy; (2) choice of criteria that can be used in properly assessing and measuring literacy; and (3) conflict between the importance and necessity of literacy assessment and the difficulty of fulfilling the prerequisite…

Policy implications stemming from empirical analyses that evaluate national federal compensatory programs are clouded because negative findings could be due to either the nature of the educational process or the inadequacy of the data collection and analysis technique. This paper constructs a framework within which the separate effects of each are…

As resources become more constrained in the library community, many organizations are finding that they need to have a better understanding of their costs. To this end, this article will present one approach to conducting a cost analysis (including questions to ask yourself, project team makeup, organizational support, and data organization). We…

One of a series of instructional booklets designed to introduce adult education program planners to the basic concepts integral to and alternative strategies for conducting needs assessments, this instructional booklet deals with determining what information to collect when conducting a needs assessment. Described first is the relationship of the…

This guide was designed for trainers presenting inservice workshops for program evaluators, teachers, principals, curriculum specialists, and others responsible for school programs. It is keyed to a companion volume, the Program Evaluator's Guide (ED l42 563), the primary source for workshop participants. Developed under the California Evaluation…