A long-standing disconnect between social work practice and research exists that begins with our current education model. When taught separately, students often think they are distinctly different areas of social work that do not have to coexist. This conceptualization of research and practice as separate could contribute to the dearth of research…

Large-scale randomized studies provide the best means of evaluating practical, replicable approaches to improving educational outcomes. This article discusses the advantages, problems, and pitfalls of these evaluations, focusing on alternative methods of randomization, recruitment, ensuring high-quality implementation, dealing with attrition, and…

Identifying effective literacy interventions for teachers of very young children is important, but it is not easy. In this case study, we share our experiences implementing a quasi-experimental evaluation of an early literacy program. We describe the design and context of the study and discuss three key issues that we encountered with data…

When swift, accurate appraisal of evidence is required to inform policy concerning broad research questions, and budgetary constraints limit the employment of large research teams, researchers face a significant challenge which is sometimes met by reviewing existing systematic reviews. In this paper we highlight the challenges inherent in the…

Participatory Health Research is a collective term adopted globally for participatory action research in a health context. As an approach to research, it challenges current ways used within the health sciences to measure research impact as research, learning and action are integrated throughout the research process and dependent on context and…

In January 2014, I began working as an evaluator on an education reform project being implemented by faculty in science and engineering departments at my university. The core goals of the project were for participating faculty members to improve students' learning, engagement, and recruitment and retention in selected introductory-level courses…

We explore new tools and methods for learning designers and researchers to characterize pedagogical approaches that are applied to the design of MOOCs. This paper makes three main contributions to literature on MOOC design and evaluation: (1) an Expanded Assessing MOOC Pedagogies instrument for use by learning designers and researchers within…

Descriptive assessments involve recording naturally occurring instances of behavior and corresponding antecedent and consequent events. Authors have argued for the use of two forms of descriptive assessment, structured and narrative Antecedent-Behavior-Consequence recording, because these methods may require little training. However, the extent to…

Funding organisations are increasingly asking academics to show evidence of the economic and social value generated by their research. These requests have often been associated with the emergence of a so-called "new social contract for research" and are related to the implementation of new research evaluation systems. Although the…

The social and ecological validity of a body of research may impact the degree to which interventions will be used outside of research contexts. The purpose of this review was to determine the extent to which social and ecological validity were demonstrated for interventions designed to increase social skills for young children with autism…

This case study describes the use of a regression discontinuity design and a quasi-experimental design to evaluate the impact of School Improvement Grants on high school students' reading, mathematics, and science achievement. The high schools that participated in the School Improvement Grant program were very low performing and received…

Vignettes, brief descriptions of fictional characters and situations, serve as a tool to study people's lives, perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes about specific situations. Although not widely used in library and information science (LIS) research, vignettes can depersonalize responses to controversial situations or behavioral responses related…

The ultimate communicative purpose of literature reviews is to convince the reader of the worthiness of the writer's research, which is realized stage by stage and evaluation plays an important role in achieving this end. However, concerns about evaluation demonstration in novice academic writers' literature reviews have been repeatedly voiced in…

Second language (L2) researchers often have to develop or change the instruments they use to measure numerous constructs (Norris & Ortega, 2012). Given the prevalence of researcher-developed and -adapted data collection instruments, and given the profound effect instrumentation can have on results, thorough reporting of instrumentation is…

Net Promoter System (NPS) is well known as an evaluation measure of the growth engine of big companies in the business area. The ultimate goal of my research is to build an action rules and meta-actions based recommender system for improving NPS scores of 34 companies (clients) dealing with similar businesses in the US and Canada. With the given…