The growing demand for leadership competencies in the global workforce has expanded undergraduate programs integrating leadership theory, organizational development, and data-driven decision-making. This paper examines the development of an undergraduate leadership program evaluation at a liberal arts college in the southern United States.…

Mentoring is a series of collaborative activities and conversations between young people and older or more experienced persons (i.e., mentors) who are acting in a helping capacity to provide support that benefits one or more areas of the young person's development. This resource offers those who develop and implement mentoring services meaningful…

In recent decades, there has been growing concern about teacher preparation at university and the link to educational quality. As a result, higher education institutions have designed programmes to help faculty teachers further their development in their professional careers. However, the literature pinpoints a lack of empirical evidence on…

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…

Many teacher education researchers have expressed concerns about the lack of rigorous impact evaluations of teacher preparation practices. I summarize these various concerns as they relate to issues of internal validity, measurement, and external validity. I then assess the prevalence of these issues by reviewing 166 impact evaluations of teacher…

Guaranteed income (GI) pilots are increasing in popularity in cities and counties nationwide to improve compensation for early educators. By design, GI pilots focus on providing direct cash to participants with no strings attached. Direct cash is also a strategy sometimes used in early care and education (ECE) to increase income and help talented…

This research investigates the linkage between training evaluation, learning design and training transfer. A new training evaluation model, (i.e., learning-transfer evaluation model [LTEM]), was used to examine its ability to provide evaluative evidence through robust assessments in pre-, post- and delayed assessments. The model was used to…

This article addresses the debate on pre-evaluative choices of impact depictions and the forms of responses between applicants and funders. By adopting a reflexive perspective on the social impact of social sciences, this article explores researchers' vocabularies in the research proposals and mid-term reports of consortiums during the Strategic…

The purpose of this article is to identify proper uses for mixed methods in leadership research and assessment. This article will highlight research and assessment questions that are best served by mixed methods and will offer practitioner-friendly guides and examples for integrating quantitative and qualitative data to help eat the whole whale…

The notion of what constitutes a high-quality work-integrated learning experience has received increasing attention in the literature, particularly over the past decade. To date, the definitions of high-quality work-integrated learning have been broad and there remains a need to understand how elements of quality can be operationalized,…

Teacher professional development (PD) is among the most prominent levers used to improve teaching quality. The findings of research studies examining PD interventions are heterogeneous, with meta-analyses indicating mean positive impacts but also the existence of many ineffective programs. "Educational Researcher" has served as a…

Research on Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers (TOCIT) has gained traction in recent years in educational scholarship. Yet very few studies have evaluated teacher education programs that prepare TOCIT within the U.S. context or have focused on the promising pedagogical practices used to prepare TOCIT. The challenge of doing program…

Background: Recent research suggests that instrumental relationship styles can enhance the effectiveness of school-based mentoring, however, little research has been conducted with young children. This study reports findings from a three-year evaluation of an instrumental Literacy-Enhanced Mentoring (LEM) program that integrates a structured,…

Disparities in gifted representation across demographic subgroups represents a large and persistent challenge in U.S. public schools. In this paper, we measure the impacts of a school-wide curricular intervention designed to address such disparities. We implemented Nurturing for a Bright Tomorrow (NBT) as a cluster randomized trial across…

In this manuscript, we describe a coding club we created and implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic. We were purposeful in creating the club to: (a) focus on design and problem solving as the basis for learning computer coding and (b) include elements to improve the engagement of girls. We ran multiple iterations of a Girls Design with Code Club…