The field of program evaluation lacks interactive teaching tools. To address this pedagogical issue, the authors developed a collaborative learning technique called Program Evaluation: The Board Game. The authors present the game and its development in this practitioner-oriented article. The evaluation board game is an adaptable teaching tool…

Universal screening is a critical prerequisite to providing early school-based prevention and intervention services for students at risk for or with academic, behavioral, or emotional difficulties. Although use of academic and behavioral screening has become more prevalent, criteria for making informed decisions about appropriate screening tools…

This paper describes a comprehensive model of alignment that provides a foundation for meaningful reporting of students' academic progress over time. The model includes both horizontal and vertical alignment as integral parts of the development of content standards, test blueprints, items, item pools, instruments, performance level descriptors,…

This article presents the results of a factor analysis on the distance education surveys "Is Online Learning Right for Me?" and "What Technical Skills Do I Need?" Both surveys are 15-question, forced response, self-scoring guides that have face validity for individual traits and skills believed to contribute to potential success in an…

This paper presents examples of rubrics that can be used in the assessment of the acquisition of generic skills in accounting education. A rubric is a matrix containing the various factors of an assignment along one dimension (rows) and descriptors of the qualitative levels of accomplishment along the other dimension (columns). A rubric can…

This document describes the breadth of the research being conducted in 2008 by the Research and Development Division at Educational Testing Service (ETS). The research described falls into three large categories: (1) Research supported by the ETS research allocation; (2) Research funded by testing programs at ETS; and (3) Research funded by…

The Anamnestic Comparative Self Assessment (ACSA) measure of subjective well-being (SWB) aims to reduce the problems of cultural bias and relativity to external standards by allowing people to define the endpoints or "anchors" of the measurement scale. In medical terminology anamnestic denotes "based on memory". The ACSA uses…

Literacy is an issue for many low-income audiences. Using visual information processing theories, the goal was improving readability of a food behavior checklist and ultimately improving its ability to accurately capture existing changes in dietary behaviors. Using group interviews, low-income clients (n = 18) evaluated 4 visual styles. The text…

This occasional paper introduces the methods of research synthesis and meta-analysis to researchers and consumers of research in the field of adult learning and literacy. To begin, the first section of the paper defines key terms and offers a brief history of how the methodologies developed. The second section provides a conceptualization of…

The purpose of this paper is to summarize the research on service learning pedagogy into the realm of professional practice for students with disabilities. At this point in the development of a research base for service learning, an emerging need for studies is reported. Limited research exists which studies the impact of service learning…

Increasing demands for evidence-based early childhood services and the need by policymakers to know whether a program is effective or whether it warrants a significant investment of public and/or private funds--coupled with the often-politicized debate around these topics--make it imperative for policymakers and civic leaders to have independent…

One way to assess the quality of education in post-secondary institutions is through the use of performance indicators. Studies that have compared currently popular process indicators (e.g., library size, percentage of faculty with PhD) found that after controlling for incoming student ability, these process indicators tend to be weakly associated…

This study empirically explores the comparability of traditional survey-based retention research methodology with an alternative approach that relies on data commonly available in institutional student databases. Drawing on Tinto's [Tinto, V. (1993). "Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition" (2nd Ed.), The University…

The authors assert that, in order to teach vocabulary more effectively and better understand its relation to comprehension, we need first to address how vocabulary knowledge and growth are assessed. They argue that "vocabularly assessment is grossly undernourished, both in its theoretical and practical aspects--that it has been driven by…

It is evident from previous research that user satisfaction is a multidimensional, subjective variable which can be affected by many factors other than performance of the system or searcher. This article draws on information retrieval and information systems literature in an attempt to understand what user satisfaction is, how it is measured, what…