Study Skills in any guise are integral to Higher Education worldwide, existing to help student success. Some argue generic or bolt-on Study Skills do not help with success, others that embedded Study Skills do, but no-one advocates actually evaluating Study Skills in a context of success defined as helping with student educational gain and…

The purpose of this study was to assess and describe the status of program evaluation within the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) sites. The National Science Foundation's REU program supports thousands of undergraduates annually in hands-on, immersive research experiences under the mentorship of…

Purpose: Considering current debates on ecosystem services' effectiveness and the AIS/AKIS functioning, in this study we suggest a new, systemic way to evaluate extension systems (ESs). Using this model, we compared the effectiveness of ESs in three countries with essential differences but also characteristic similarities in their agricultural…

Program evaluations that lack experimental design often fail to produce evidence of impact because there is no available control group. Theory-based evaluations can generate evidence of a program's causal effects if evaluators collect evidence along the theorized causal chain and identify possible competing causes. However, few methods are…

This study examined school psychology faculty beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions regarding the status of graduate training in evidence-based assessment and intervention. The perspectives of a national sample of faculty in the U.S. were obtained through an online survey. A qualitative examination of faculty responses provided an understanding of…

As learning center professionals, we have much to gain by conducting assessment to understand how our services help college students develop their academic strategies. The type of data we collect makes a difference in the interpretations we can draw, however. An initial step in becoming a scholarly practitioner is to consider the strengths and…

Formative assessment can serve as a catalyst for increased student effort and student learning. Yet, many engineering degree programmes are dominated by summative assessment and make limited use of formative assessment. The present case study serves as an example on how formative assessment can be used strategically to increase student effort and…

Students with autism may struggle to develop the academic skills necessary for success in school and beyond. Understanding and improving academic skills performance requires appropriate measurement approaches. One such option that has been minimally studied with students with autism is curriculum-based measurement (CBM). Coinciding with the need…

"Essential Global Learning" is a compilation of seminal AAC&U articles about global learning. This publication provides a working definition of global learning, a framework for assessment of global learning, and case studies of high-impact global learning activities on a variety of campuses. It is a foundational publication for…

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…

Early math ability is one of the best predictors of children's math and reading skills into late elementary school. Children with stronger math proficiency in elementary school, in turn, are more likely to graduate from high school and attend college. However, early math skills have not historically been a major focus of instruction in preschool…

Purpose: Family support programs commonly use self-sufficiency matrices (SSMs) to measure family outcomes, however, validation research on SSMs is sparse. This study examined the reliability of the Colorado Family Support Assessment 2.0 (CFSA 2.0) to measure family self-reliance across 14 domains (e.g., employment). Methods: Ten written case…

The story of the Institute for Health Professions at Cambria Heights illustrates the positive impact of using performance assessments rather than relying on the state Regents exams.

Identifying effective literacy interventions for teachers of very young children is important, but it is not easy. In this case study, we share our experiences implementing a quasi-experimental evaluation of an early literacy program. We describe the design and context of the study and discuss three key issues that we encountered with data…

As part of their graduate education, in-service teachers identified an area of instructional focus, video recorded their classroom instruction at two intervals in a semester-long course, formed peer groups, and shared their videos for the purpose of obtaining feedback for professional growth. After the conclusion of the course, participants were…