Programs that improve teaching effectiveness represent a core strategy to improve student educational outcomes and close student achievement gaps. This article compiles empirical values of intraclass correlations for designing effective and efficient experimental studies evaluating the effects of these programs. The Early Childhood Longitudinal…

Evaluations should be issues driven, not methods driven. The starting point should be priority programs to be evaluated or policies to be tested. From this starting point, a list of evaluation questions is identified. For each evaluation question, the task is to identify the best available method for answering that question. Hence it is likely…

This paper reports a systematic literature review examining empirical studies on the effects of peer assessment for learning. Peer assessment is fundamentally a social process whose core activity is feedback given to and received from others, aimed at enhancing the performance of each individual group member and/or the group as a whole. This makes…

Group projects are an important component of higher education, and the use of peer assessment of students' individual contributions to group projects has increased. The researchers employed an expectancy theory approach and an experimental design in a field setting to investigate conditions that influence students' motivation to rate their peers'…

To help states and districts make informed decisions about the professional development (PD) they implement to improve reading instruction, the U.S. Department of Education commissioned the Early Reading PD Interventions Study to examine the impact of two research-based PD interventions for reading instruction: (1) a content-focused teacher…

The desirability of combining tests of theory with evaluations of treatment modalities is argued in an investigation of the effectiveness of a juvenile diversion program. Using a true experimental design (with randomization), recidivism analyses dependent on court record data failed to demonstrate the relative superiority of any of three treatment…

The state of the art in observational studies is discussed, with emphasis on explanatory research--studies of program effectiveness in which an attempt is made to explain the reasons for the results as well as describing the results. In addition to the collection of data and presentation of statistical facts, the explanatory study involves the…

An empirical study was conducted in order to obtain treatment effect estimates with the Special Regression model for groups in which there was no treatment. General mathematics test scores were obtained from 730 ninth graders in city schools somewhat similar to Title I schools, but in which no special treatments were given. Hypothetical…

Identifying the effects of the New York State Experimental Prekindergarten Program on the development of children requires that a broad array of data be analyzed. In studying the effects of the program, the evaluation unit is interested in determining whether there is an overall effect, and whether children of different ages and different levels…

Data from the 1969-70 and 1970-71 Head Start Planned Variation (HSPV)Study were used to examine program-child interactions. An effort was made to determine whether different preschool programs have different cognitive effects on different types of children. Seven hypotheses for the analysis of the data were generated from the results of the HSPV…

An application of evaluation methodology to innovative educational programs through a case study of a Chicago suburban high school program for alternative education is presented. The evaluation methodology encompasses the difficulty in combining comparative programs, individual-diagnostic, and individual developmental measures, the selection of…