The Indiana University Kokomo (IUK) School of Education (SOE) collaborates with 38 school districts in the North Central Indiana region in the Clinical Educational Partnership (CEP). The purpose of the CEP is to allow P-12 administrators and teachers to give input on the SOE's program development initiatives. Education students engage in practicum…

Attention and executive function (EF) dysregulation are common in a number of disorders including autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Better understanding of the relationship between indirect and direct measures of attention and EF and common neurodevelopmental diagnoses may contribute to more efficient and effective…

In relation to teaching and learning approaches that improve student learning outcomes, threshold concepts have generated substantial interest in higher education. They have been described as "portals" that lead to a transformed way of understanding or thinking, enabling learners to progress, and have been enthusiastically adopted to…

Evaluating teachers' professional development initiatives (PDI) is one of the main challenges for the teacher professionalisation field. Although different studies have focused on the effectiveness of PDI, the obtained effects and evaluative methods have been found to be widely divergent. By means of a narrative review, this study provides an…

Mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT) measures have been widely adopted by researchers. Critics have debated the value of such measures and questioned the type of knowledge that these access. This article reports on a study where the challenges in measuring teachers' knowledge were illuminated through investigating relationships between the…

Public school critics often point to rising expenditures and relatively flat test scores to justify their school reform agendas. The claims are flawed because their analyses fail to account for the difference in data types between dollars (ratio) and test scores (interval). A cost-benefit analysis using dollars as a common metric for both costs…

Evaluation occurs within a specific context and is influenced by the economic, political, historical, and social forces that shape that context. The culture of evaluation is thus very much embedded in the culture of accountability that currently prevails in public sector institutions, policies, and program. As such, our understanding of the…

The literature on bibliometric indices for assessing scholarly impact, in particular the "h" index (Hirsch, 2005) and its many variants, is extensive, but nevertheless Ruscio and colleagues (this issue) succeed in making a valuable contribution. They have made the effort of collecting publication and citation data for no less than 1,750…

The number of years a child of school-entry age can expect to remain in school is of great interest both as a measure of individual human capital and of the performance of an education system. An approximate indicator of this concept is the sum of age-specific enrolment rates. The relatively low data demands of this indicator that are feasible to…

Ruscio and colleagues (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) have done a great service by systematically comparing indices of scholarly impact. Three aspects of their work are particularly valuable: (1) Their assessment of the proliferating collection of metrics, whose development has become something of a cottage industry,…

In their article Ruscio et al. (Ruscio, Seaman, D'Oriano, Stremlo, & Mahalchik, this issue) present a comparative study of some of the different variants of the "h" index. The study evaluates a total of 22 metrics, including the "h" index and "h"-type indices, as well as other conventional measures. The novelty of their work is to a large extent…

Humphry (this issue) deserves credit for drawing attention to the long-neglected fact that differences in item discrimination parameters are often due to empirical factors and not the product of random error components. In doing so, Humphry offers a psychometrically elegant, coherent, and practically important new model that is more flexible while…

Why do we continue to see evidence that nonprofit staff feel like outcome measurement is missing important aspects of their work? Based on an analysis of over 1,000 pages of material in 10 outcome measurement guides and a focused literature review of frontline work in three types of nonprofit organizations, this article shows that existing outcome…

Behavioral scientists have struggled with units of measurement for as long as they have struggled with measurement itself. Psychology's sole attempt at an explicit unit of measurement--the Lexile Framework for Reading (Stenner, Burdick, Sanford, & Burdick, 2006)--has been and continues to be ignored by the psychometric "cognoscenti."…

In this report the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution presents the results of a self-developed Education Choice and Competition Index (ECCI) along with an interactive application that grades large school districts according to the ECCI. The index is composed of 13 pro choice criteria. The authors present the ECCI as a…