Many teacher education researchers have expressed concerns about the lack of rigorous impact evaluations of teacher preparation practices. I summarize these various concerns as they relate to issues of internal validity, measurement, and external validity. I then assess the prevalence of these issues by reviewing 166 impact evaluations of teacher…

Background/purpose: Collaborative Online International Learning projects have emerged as practices that connect students from different countries. Such actions can be appealing to universities but also arouse uncertainty. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to explore COIL experiences in HE reported in the scientific literature in terms of…

Many teacher education researchers have expressed concerns with the lack of rigorous impact evaluations of teacher preparation practices. I summarize these various concerns as they relate to issues of internal validity, external validity, and measurement. I then assess the prevalence of these issues by reviewing 166 impact evaluations of teacher…

In higher education, online students are often precluded from research assistantships that are more accessible for campus-based students. At a highly ranked institution for online learning, we developed the Undergraduate Research Program (URP) to address this gap in opportunities for online students. The URP is designed to engage fully distanced…

Professional development in teaching is a critical component of ongoing work to improve student learning outcomes in higher education, especially STEM education. While there are many large-scale professional development programs designed to help participants change the way STEM is taught, few have thoroughly evaluated the outcomes to determine…

Professional standards related to outcomes assessment call for student affairs professionals to use research to inform programming. If professionals are to rely on research to build programs that positively impact student learning outcomes, the research should be credible. We examined the quality of program effectiveness research available for…

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) increase student engagement in scientific practices and empower students to generate novel findings. Previous studies have demonstrated that CUREs are more effective at enhancing students' motivations, attitudes, science identity development, and acquisition of science process skills than…

These are the appendices for the report "Study of College Transition Messaging in GEAR UP: Impacts on Enrolling and Staying in College." Five appendices are included in the document: (1) Additional Details about College Transition Messaging; (2) Additional Information about How the Study Was Designed and Implemented; (3) Supplemental…

Background: A key aim of educational research is for findings to inform practice, thereby bringing about improvements in teaching and learning. However, the relationship between research and practice is complex, and there is often no clear link between changes in practice and research findings. One of the challenges for research and practice is…

This study examines doctoral student perceptions regarding learning acquired during a weeklong residency program wherein they were exposed to a strategic framework designed to help conceptualize the design for their dissertation study. Using a simple quantitative, pre-experimental, one group pre-post-test, design, a questionnaire was developed to…

Methods of causal inference are not widely used by education researchers, even though they can be extremely useful tools for eliminating selection bias and confounding factors in empirical studies. For example, researchers have established that taking additional math classes in high school is strongly correlated with success in college and higher…

To successfully implement Learning Analytics (LA) systems within higher education, we need to engage administrators, faculty, and staff alike. This paper is by and primarily for practitioners. We suggest implementation strategies that consider the human factor in adopting new technologies by analyzing the viability of our Learning Analytics…

Outcome research examining the effectiveness of teaching methods in counselor education is sparse. The researchers conducted a qualitative investigation utilizing an instrumental case study to examine the influence of a constructivist-developmental format on a play therapy counseling course in a large CACREP accredited university in the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the differences between alternative certification pathways, specifically those offered through a university-based, post baccalaureate certification program and a regional education service center certification program. A quantitative research design was implemented and archived scores on the TExES PPR…

This study reports on Residency I, the first semester of a yearlong residency that utilizes problem-based learning scenarios, combined with field work, that covers both content and context and is meant to positively impact teacher candidates' self-efficacy as well as their actual efficacy as measured by scores on the edTPA. This quantitative…