School-based evaluations of interventions are increasingly common in education research. Ideally, the results of these evaluations are used to make evidence-based policy decisions for students. However, it is difficult to make generalizations from these evaluations because the types of schools included in the studies are typically not selected…

This article reports on two professional development programs for mathematics teachers and their effects on student achievement. The projects' design and their implementation within a larger municipality in Sweden, working together with over 90 teachers and 5000 students in elementary school, are described by using a set of core critical features…

Estimating the efficacy of different instructional modalities, techniques, and interventions is challenging because teaching style covaries with instructor, and the typical student only takes a course once. We introduce the individualized treatment effect (ITE) from analyses of personalized medicine as a means to quantify individual student…

Although data-based decision making is an evidence-based practice, many special educators have difficulty applying the practice within daily routines. We applied the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to understand the influences that promote or hinder early childhood special educators' intentions to collect data. We assessed three influences on…

To keep pace with today's rapidly growing knowledge-driven society, productive self-regulation of one's learning processes are essential. We introduce and discuss a trace-based measurement protocol to measure the effects of scaffolding interventions on self-regulated learning (SRL) processes. It guides tracing of learners' actions in a learning…

This report describes in detail how researchers, policymakers, and program administrators can recognize opportunities for experiments and carry them out. Specifically, the report focuses on opportunistic experiments, defined as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that study the effects of initiatives, program changes, or policy actions that…

As information technology continues to evolve rapidly, programming skills become increasingly crucial. To be able to construct superb programming skills, the training must begin before college or even senior high school. However, when developing comprehensive training programmers, the learning and teaching processes must be considered. In order to…

This article presents discussion and recommendations on approaches to retrospectively evaluating development interventions in the long term through a systems lens. It is based on experiences from the implementation of an 18-month study to investigate the impact of development interventions on economic and social change over a 40-year period in the…

This study investigated the effect of an intervention regarding the use of simulations in science teaching on primary school preservice science teachers' (n = 36) self-assessed technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK). The connection of their self-assessed TPACK on their views on the usefulness of simulations in science teaching…

In higher education, and in community colleges in particular, there is a need to engage faculty and staff in closing the loop--using evidence for assessment, planning, and decision-making. Connect to Learning, a Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE) funded grant project brings together 26 colleges and universities to work as…

This paper provides outcomes of a study examining the effectiveness of a year-long professional development training series designed to support in-service educators in learning a systematic approach to functional assessment-based interventions developed by Umbreit and colleagues (2007) that has met with demonstrated success when implemented with…

Learning Analytics (LA) is a field that aims to optimize learning through the study of dynamical processes occurring in the students' context. It covers the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data about students and their contexts. This study aims at surveying existing research on LA to identify approaches, topics, and needs for…

The purpose of the study is to determine what effects explicit and systematic math intervention instruction will have on student's performance on math assessments. The study will focus on a small group of fifth grade students that have been identified as needing targeted intervention (tier 2) and intensive interventions (tier 1) through the…

It is well established that a student's capacity to regulate his or her own learning is a key determinant of academic success, suggesting that interventions targeting improvements in self-regulation will have a positive impact on academic performance. However, to evaluate the success of such interventions, the self-regulatory characteristics of…

Evaluations should be issues driven, not methods driven. The starting point should be priority programs to be evaluated or policies to be tested. From this starting point, a list of evaluation questions is identified. For each evaluation question, the task is to identify the best available method for answering that question. Hence it is likely…