This article advances the literature on assessment of EFNEP's effectiveness. Factor analysis of Behavior Checklist items were performed to arrive at a parsimonious set of constructs used to assess the effects of program attributes on participants' behavior change. Based on the data from Michigan EFNEP, the use of constructs demonstrated a robust…

This study looks at the fairness of assessing learning journals both as the fairness in creating a valid and robust marking process as well as how different student groups may have unfair disadvantages in performing well in reflective assessment tasks. The fairness of a marking process is discussed through reflecting on the practical process and…

"Great Teachers and Great Leaders" (GTGL) is one of six research summaries issued by the U.S. Department of Education in support of its Blueprint for Reform. This review examines the presentation of research about improving teacher and administrator quality in GTGL. The review concludes that there are serious flaws in the research summary. The…

Body mass index (BMI) is increasingly recognized as an inadequate measure for determining obesity in children. Therefore, the aim within this study was to investigate other indirect methods of body fat assessment that could potentially be used in place of BMI. Twenty-four children (boys: 13.8 [plus or minus] 0.8 yr; girls: 13.3 [plus or minus] 0.5…

The No Child Left Behind Act requires states to publish high school graduation rates for public schools; the U.S. Department of Education is currently considering a mandate to standardize high school graduation rate reporting. However, no consensus exists among researchers or policymakers about how to measure high school graduation rates. We use…

We find an individual's rank within their reference group has effects on later objective outcomes. To evaluate the impact of local rank, we use a large administrative dataset tracking over two million students in England from primary through to secondary school. Academic rank within primary school has sizable, robust and significant effects on…

This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

This paper examines the impact of vouchers in general and voucher design in particular on public school performance. It argues that all voucher programs are not created equal. There are often fundamental differences in voucher designs that affect public school incentives differently and induce different responses from them. It analyzes two voucher…

As the largest international study ever taken in history, the Trend in Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has been held as a benchmark to measure U.S. student performance in the global context. In-depth analyses of the TIMSS project are conducted in this study to examine key issues of the comparative investigation: (1) item flaws in mathematics…

Calculating and reporting appropriate measures of effect size are becoming standard practice in psychological research. One of the most common scenarios encountered involves the comparison of 2 groups, which includes research designs that are experimental (e.g., random assignment to treatment vs. placebo conditions) and nonexperimental (e.g.,…

The use of standardized tests for outcome assessment has grown dramatically in recent years. Two driving factors have been the No Child Left Behind legislation, and the increase in outcome assessment measures by accrediting agencies such as AACSB, the international accrediting body for business schools. Despite the growth in usage, little effort…

This paper considers the model of school effectiveness (SE) currently dominant in research, policy and practice in England (although the concerns it raises are international). It shows, principally through consideration of initial and propagated error, that SE results cannot be relied upon. By considering the residual difference between the…

Using a unique sample of rural Kentucky residents, we demonstrated that, in the domain of operational and competitive environmental uncertainties, self-efficacy beliefs are significantly higher among nascent entrepreneurs than among non-entrepreneurs. We employed the hierarchical logistic regression analysis to demonstrate that this result is…

The need for education to help every child rather than focus on average attainment has become a more central part of the policy agenda in the US and the UK. Remedial programmes are often difficult to evaluate because participation is usually based on pupil characteristics that are largely unobservable to the analyst. In this paper we evaluate…

The main purpose of this research is to examine the effectiveness of Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) from a sample of university teachers' and students' view. The study adopts exploratory descriptive design. Participants of this research were 300 teachers and 600 graduate students from 3 Iranian higher education institutions. A 30-item format…