The South Carolina Master Naturalist Program provides nature-based education to citizen volunteers who will promote environmental stewardship and is offered at six host sites across the state. We conducted a mixed-methods evaluation (the integration of qualitative and quantitative data) of the South Carolina Master Naturalist Program. Overall, the…

Meta-analyses are systematic summaries of research that use quantitative methods to find the mean effect size (standardized mean difference) for interventions. Critics of meta-analysis point out that such analyses can conflate the results of low- and high-quality studies, make improper comparisons and result in statistical noise. All these…

This article compares the purposes and content of the four foundational documents of the American Evaluation Association (AEA): the Program Evaluation Standards, the AEA Public Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation, the AEA Evaluator Competencies, and the AEA Guiding Principles. This reflection on alignment is an early effort in the third…

Headsprout Early Reading is a computer-based program designed on behavioral principles to enhance the basic skills that underpin the initial development of reading. In a within and between groups design, and using primary schools within Northern Ireland that had a currently high proportion of disadvantaged pupils, children who were behind their…

BRIDGES is a software framework for creating engaging assignments for required courses such as data structures and algorithms. It provides students with a simplified API that populates their own data structure implementations with live and real-world data, and provides the ability for students to easily visualize the data structures they create as…

The paper analyzes the education system of private security personnel in Slovenia. Through the presentation and comparison of education and training programs for obtaining national professional qualification (hereafter: NPQ) and secondary and post-secondary education programs, it indicates shortcomings and opportunities for improvement. The…

This study focuses on conditions that improve reading comprehension at grade 7th. We analyze the impact of the "Lirécrire" program, and related treatment integrity, on student performance. "Lirécrire" program should improve students' reading comprehension, and follow-up sessions should lead to greater instructional change, then…

The New Culture of Water (NCW) is a catalyst for sustainable transformation between political agreements and the unsustainability of the real world, thus requiring an integral participation for an efficient water management where the academy will try to make a substantial contribution. Therefore, this study aimed to design, implement and evaluate…

According to creative writing pedagogies academic Susanne Gannon ("English in Australia, 54"(2), 43-56, 2019), and the Federal government-commissioned NAPLAN review (McGaw et al., 2020), NAPLAN has restricted how writing is taught in secondary schools. A NAPLAN-influenced structural approach to teaching writing has subsumed the…

Energy concepts are taught in many schools, but children rarely have an opportunity to grapple with energy problems and work on their own solutions. This study explores the impacts of Connect Science, a service-learning (SL) program developed to enhance elementary students' energy literacy in the United States. Program impacts were explored within…

The math intervention program, Assessment and Learning in Knowledge Spaces (ALEKS), at a Public Middle School (pseudonym) in the Northeast United States, was implemented for eighth grade middle school math students, but researchers have not measured its effectiveness. Grounded in the cultural relevance pedagogy, the purpose of this quantitative…

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…

The goal of this study was to further evaluate the impact of IXL Math on math learning outcomes. Using a quasi-experimental design with matched treatment and control groups, this analysis utilized data from 312 public schools in Mississippi during the 2021-2022 school year. The middle school analysis included 272 schools (136 treatment, 136…

The Wisconsin School Violence and Bullying Prevention Study, funded by the National Institutes of Justice (NIJ), was a two-year case-control study in 24 Wisconsin middle schools (11 experimental; 13 control) seeking to understand the impact of a comprehensive bullying prevention program on bullying victimization rates. Participating schools'…

Qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) is gaining ground in evaluation circles, but the number of applications is still limited. In this article, we consider the challenges that can emerge during a QCA evaluation by drawing on our experience of conducting one in the field of development cooperation. For each stage of the evaluation process, we…