The so-called refugee wave in the summer of 2015 led to an impressive wave of helpfulness in Austrian society. Universities Austria (uniko)--the umbrella organization of the 22 public universities in Austria--set up and launched an initiative called MORE. MORE provides refugees and asylum seekers with additional opportunities and perspectives that…

Engaging students in assessment practice benefits honors students, faculty, and administrators. Students gain meaningful research experience while honors programs receive data to help assess student learning and prepare for program review. A one-semester course, Program Evaluation Experiences, tasks students (n = 10) with collecting and analyzing…

Contemporary environmental crises are often attributable to a growing disconnect between humans and the natural world. One potential solution to this disconnect, as it relates to children, is the naturalizing of school playgrounds. This paper seeks to contextualize the impacts of a school ground naturalization program on the outdoor play and…

Background: For 15 years, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) "HEADS UP" education campaign has focused on increasing awareness of concussion among children to reduce adverse outcomes from this injury. Objective: To keep pace with the rapid expansion in media coverage, research, state laws and education efforts on…

Two paradigms inform responses to active shooting situations: a traditional lockdown approach where individuals find cover in a classroom and lock the door, and a multi-option approach where individuals evacuate the area, create barricades, and, in last resort situations, actively resist the gunman. While a majority of schools conduct active…

Remediation has long been a costly way to address the misalignment between K-12 and higher education. In 2011, the California State University (CSU), the nation's largest public four-year university system, enacted "Early Start," requiring students needing remediation to enroll in such courses in the summer before their freshman year. We…

Australia's state-based public sector standing anti-corruption commissions each have an education function. The function is underpinned by a largely unquestioned assumption that integrity education will reduce levels of misconduct and corruption in the public sector. This study explores how these commissions undertake evaluations and publicly…

Pathways to Youth Leadership was an Erasmus+: Youth in Action long term training involving 24 youngsters from 12 countries. Grant cuts required squeezing the residential programme, originally planned to last three weeks, into two. That is why, after taking part in the Erasmus+ Virtual Exchange (E+VE) training, we successfully added five VE…

This paper aims to survey the current landscape of education policy evaluation across OECD countries and economies by examining recent trends and contextual factors that can promote more robust education policy evaluation, as well as identifying key challenges. It takes a view of policy evaluation as an activity that takes place throughout the…

Educators have long recognized that students gain important skills through real-world learning, which frequently takes place outside school hours or school walls. In Boston and Providence, after-school program leaders engaged in a bold experiment to formally recognize these skills through an innovative credential called a digital badge. For two…

In 2009, the U.S. Institute of Education Sciences (IES) allocated $120 million to establish the Reading for Understanding (RfU) initiative. This initiative responded to concern that children's improvement in reading comprehension had leveled off over the previous few decades, coupled with the observation that research on reading comprehension had…

European policies on international mobility of students in initial vocational education and training (IVET) are working but more is needed. Young people in IVET today have more opportunities to do part of their training abroad than their peers of a decade ago. In most European Union (EU) Member States they tend to receive better information,…

Istation is a digital-based instructional intervention tool for various content areas aimed at pre-K through 8th grade learners. The Istation Reading program consists of formative assessments, named Istation Indicators of Progress (ISIP™), which are computer-adaptive and diagnostic literacy assessments designed to track student growth over time.…

During the 2019 General Session, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 166, "School Readiness Amendments," to improve the coordination and alignment of preschool programming. This report is provided to the Education Interim Committee as a summary of an evaluation of and the efficacy of both the highquality school readiness grant programs.…

Educational researchers are often tasked with postulating and measuring unknown processes that account for observed outcomes. Logically, this requires inductive reasoning about which constructs are relevant to the situation we seek to understand, prior to attempts at measurement. Exploratory mixed methods designs, along with a few classic designs…