Background: Mentoring programs pair non-familial adults with children and adolescents for the purposes of promoting positive youth development. Although these programs are widely popular, evaluations tend to show that mentoring programs have, on average, modest effects on youth outcomes. Some researchers have suggested that mentoring programs…

Several influential reviews and two meta-reviews have converged on the position that teacher professional development (PD) is more effective when it is sustained, collaborative, subject specific, draws on external expertise, has buy-in from teachers, and is practice based. This consensus view has now been incorporated in government policy and…

The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze the process of co-creation and evaluation of an educational video game application called "Natur-Kingdom," developed within the framework of the NaturTEC-Kids Living Lab with the active participation of children and adolescents. This article aims to demonstrate how the integration of end…

There is a burgeoning body of evidence on the average impacts of educational programs. Yet, for many local decision makers, because impacts can vary across sites, the question of whether a certain program will work in their particular district or school remains. This article addresses the question of the generalizability of large-scale average…

University retention and completion rates underestimate true levels of student participation because of their reliance on measurements taken at commencement (or census date) and end of a program. As a result, these statistical snapshots miss what happens in between, failing to capture the true reach of the teaching and learning process, as well as…

The present review sought to examine contemporary applied behavior analytic (ABA)-based assessment and curriculum protocols for teaching language skills to children with autism and evaluate the evidence supporting their reliability, validity, and effectiveness. Results of the literature search revealed the existence of 18 ABA educational…

This report contains descriptions of implementation and impact data related to CARES's effect on students, families and staff in 2020-2021. Responses to CARES-related survey items showed the majority of respondents were impacted positively. Further, the CARES team increased employee recognition efforts, the number of RAVEs given increased to…

The Early Interactive Reading Software Program encourages literacy growth and achievement in students in grades K-3. The program addresses early reading through the use of computer-based literacy software which provides individualized instruction designed to supplement students' classroom learning. During the 2019-2020 school year, these software…

We describe a combination of methods for assessing the effectiveness of complex interventions, especially where substantial heterogeneity with regard to the population, intervention, comparison, outcomes, and study design of interest is expected. We applied these methods in a recent systematic review of the effectiveness of reinforced home-based…

Given the widespread use of non-experimental (NE) methods for assessing program impacts, there is a strong need to know whether NE approaches yield causally valid results in field settings. In within-study comparison (WSC) designs, the researcher compares treatment effects from an NE with those obtained from a randomized experiment that shares the…

Drawing on Glenn Fulcher's extensive work in performance-based language assessment of speaking, this paper explores the assessment of L2 speaking ability in local language testing contexts. For that purpose, I review Fulcher's influential work that highlights the relationship between the speaking construct, the task, the performance, and the…

Although every educational institution has a code of academic honesty, they still encounter incidents of plagiarism. These are difficult and time-consuming to detect and deal with. This paper explores the use of personalized assessments with the goal of reducing incidents of plagiarism, proposing a personalized assessment software framework…

The field of Adult Literacy and Numeracy (ALN) has an evidence problem. This paper analyses that problem through the lens of three overarching types of evidence available to researchers and policymakers: Type 1 evidence, which provides descriptions of the scope of social problems; Type 2 evidence measuring the impacts of programmes addressing…

How should colleges determine whether students are placed into developmental or college-level courses? Each year, colleges place millions of students into developmental math and English courses upon enrollment. To do so, colleges most often use a high-stakes placement test, which numerous research studies have shown to be highly inaccurate in…

Experiential learning is an effective educational tool across many academic disciplines, including career development. Nine different institutions bridged by the National Institutes of Health Broadening Experiences in Scientific Training Consortium compared their experiments in rethinking and expanding training of predoctoral graduate students and…