Increasingly, schools have been adopting comprehensive, three-tiered response to intervention (RTI) systems to support students in both academics and social behavior. But with each new systems change initiative comes separate teams, data, and training and coaching systems. Given the intensity of resources required to implement and sustain such…

In 2002 President Martin Jischke initiated a new era in strategic planning at Purdue. Under his leadership, strategic planning became a centralized activity with unit plans aligned to the university plan. Strategic goals were designed to have maximum impact, which would be measurable through metrics. Strategic planning at Purdue would be an…

Introduction: Despite an explosion of interest in improving safety and reducing error in health care, one important aspect of patient safety that has received little attention is a systematic approach to education and training for the whole health care workforce. This article describes an evaluation of an innovative multiprofessional, team-based…

The majority of funding for Extension comes from local, state, and federal dollars; therefore the primary driver for evaluation is accountability for public funds. Evaluation has always been a part of Extension program implementation; however, these efforts have historically been considered a necessary component rather than a priority. The need…

High-quality care in the earliest years of life has been shown to relate to positive developmental outcomes for children, including improved early academic skills, social-emotional competencies, and cognitive functioning. Unfortunately, the early care experiences of many children are not always high quality; rather, research suggests that…

Program evaluation and planning is at the heart of efforts to integrate the domains of practice and research. Traditionally, research and practice have operated in independent spheres with practitioners focused on the implementation of programs that affect individual behavior and researchers focused on the development and testing of theory.…

During President Barack Obama's first two years in office, the administration's signature education initiative has been the Race to the Top (RTT) fund, a small part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 that was passed to stimulate the nation's ailing economy. While celebrations and criticisms of RTT abound, serious attempts to…

The evidence-based parent training intervention known as Parent Management Training-the Oregon Model (PMTO) is one particularly well-supported treatment approach for addressing child behavioral problems. Yet, there remains a need to further examine how this intervention promotes change. The purpose of this study was to develop a grounded theory…

Logic models are based on linear relationships between program resources, activities, and outcomes, and have been used widely to support both program development and evaluation. While useful in describing some programs, the linear nature of the logic model makes it difficult to capture the complex relationships within larger, multifaceted…

Low literacy rate and poor quality of education are the major drawbacks of the educational system in Pakistan. Our education is influenced by a number of factors that cause this downfall. Some of them are more prominent, such as low enrollment and high dropout rate at the primary level, different standards of education, low budget allocation for…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two recent examples of the New Zealand Ministry of Education's approach to reducing the persistent disparities in achievement between students of different social and ethnic groups. The first example is cluster-based school improvement, and the second is the development of national standards for…

A "blueprint" is a guide designed to improve large-scale implementations of a specific systems or organizational approach, like School-Wide Positive Behavior Support (SWPBS). This blueprint is intended to make the conceptual theory, organizational models, and practices of SWPBS more accessible for those involved in enhancing how schools,…

Assessment of educational effectiveness provides vitally important feedback to Institutions of Higher Education. It also provides important information to external stakeholders, such as prospective students, parents, governmental and local regulatory entities, professional and regional accrediting organizations, and representatives of the…

Networks aiming for fundamental changes bring together a variety of actors who are part and parcel of a problematic context. These system innovation projects need to be accompanied by a monitoring and evaluation approach that supports and maintains reflexivity to be able to deal with uncertainties and conflicts while challenging current practices…

Museum leaders around the country are in the midst of examining and changing their business models in response to new economic realities. Museum educators have an opportunity to play a leading role in this endeavor. To do so educators must understand the relationship between money and mission. For too long there has been a belief that the…