Pre-service teacher preparedness is a measurement of a teacher candidate's ability to become an effective teacher (Clark, Byrnes, & Sudweeks, 2015). A growing number of Educator Preparation Providers' (EPPs') accrediting agencies are insisting that to improve pre-service teacher preparedness, EPPs must increase the rigor of their admission…

Background/Context: The past few decades have seen an explosive growth in high-school student participation in the Advanced Placement program® (AP), with nearly two million exams completed in 2011. Traditionally, universities have considered AP enrollment as an indicator for predicting academic success during the admission process. However, AP…

Universities in Europe have been playing an increasingly important role in the institutional evaluation of political and social systems for the last thirty years. Their major contribution to those processes of accountability has been to add methods and safeguards of evaluative research. In this paper we report an illustration of how evaluative…

The purpose of this article is to invite focused discussion and critical debate about the instruments currently used to select students for art colleges in Europe and North America. At this time of significant expansion and diversification in practices of art making, we must ask if current selection instruments still work. What evidence is there…

Those who design admissions policies and procedures are the gatekeepers of higher education, and thereby play a role in shaping the direction of human society. Every year selective universities face the difficult challenge of sifting through the application materials of millions of high school graduates and deciding which applicants should be…

Learning communities can trace their origins to the 1920s and the experimental College at the University of Wisconsin, but the widespread use of learning communities to improve undergraduate education is a relatively new phenomenon. The early learning communities of the late 1980s and early 1990s consisted of groups of new freshmen co-enrolled in…

This paper demonstrates a new application of cluster analysis to segment business school students according to their degree of satisfaction with various aspects of the academic program. The resulting clusters provide additional insight into drivers of student satisfaction that are not evident from analysis of the responses of the student body as a…

Introduction: Increasing Awareness of the importance of vocational agricultural education has driven various regimes in government and Educators to embark on several review of agricultural curriculum at both secondary and tertiary institutions and as well provided policies and incentives towards motivating young ones to study and take agriculture…

I investigate the nexus of gender, student ability, and post-baccalaureate (PB) program quality. This is the first general empirical study of graduate and professional educational investment to consider inter-field differences in quality and gender composition. A primary goal of this dissertation is to establish whether admissions policy can…

Teacher preparation programs have continued to see the ever-increasing control of teacher candidates by policymakers. To control means to regulate. The problem, according to these authors, is that there are currently at least three regulating measurement and assessment obstacles faced by teacher candidates in teacher preparation programs. The…

Although over 15 years have passed since Witt (1990) noted that no empirical evidence exists to support the contention that a collaborative approach to consultation leads to more positive outcomes than a hierarchical or expert driven approach, this issue generally remains unaddressed (Schulte & Osborne, 2003). While the literature documenting…

Using an extant database, we examined three grade 1 criteria for identifying response to intervention (RTI) in English language learners (ELLs): (a) set benchmark criteria with a standard score above 95 (37th %ile) on both decoding and comprehension measures and a raw score of 40 or more correct words per minute (CWPM) on oral reading fluency; (b)…

The use of meta-analysis of patient education research as reported by Steven A. Mazzuca in a 1981 conference paper is critiqued. The way that Mazucca's meta-analysis conforms to the criteria for effective conduct of the six methodological tasks of integrative reviews as specified by Jackson (1980) is assessed. The extent to which meta-analysis…

Three types of macro-level variables for program analysis--cultural, economic and demographic--provide a context for evaluation and offer alternative explanations for program success or failure. The problems of causality and availability of data, as well as the usefulness of macro variables in meta evaluation are discussed. (Author/CM)

The idea of diverting youths away from the juvenile justice system has grown in the past decade. Most evaluations of diversion programs have been program-centered rather than examining individual programs, and in most cases, success has been judged by recidivism rates. A diversion program, called the Careers Center, was investigated and a…