Educational leadership preparation programs are expected to train graduates who change their practice and produce outcomes for teachers and students. However, programs are challenged to produce evidence of their impact while also evaluating for formative purposes. This paper describes collaboration between an educational leadership program…

Education reform advocates who base policy decisions on empirical research often face the argument that because background variables explain so much of student outcomes, it follows that policy interventions cannot be effective. This policy brief explains the logical fallacy in the argument, illustrating with two examples, one taken from the…

Based on 65 interviews with professionals and parents conducted during 2007-2008, this 16-month, mainly qualitative evaluation of Parentline Plus' Time to Talk Community Programme (a preventative initiative within England's teenage pregnancy strategy) found that a community development approach and an ethos of partnership with parents and…

Environmental education is a widespread, yet relatively unexamined strategy to reduce human-wildlife conflicts. We evaluated knowledge, attitudes and behavioral intentions toward bear conservation after five years of environmental education in a Quichua community. Conflicts with livestock predation created mixed attitudes and behaviors toward bear…

The Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) Initiative offers a unique opportunity to conduct large-scale, multisite, multilevel program evaluation in the context of a federal environment that places many requirements and constraints on how the grants are conducted and managed. Federal programs stress performance-based outcomes, valid and reliable…

The quality of e-learning can be defined in many different ways, reflecting different stakeholders and the complexity of the systems and processes used in higher education. These different conceptions of quality can be mutually contradictory and, while politically significant, may also be beyond the direct control or influence of institutional…

A statewide evaluation of school counseling programs in Utah high schools explored which features of the ASCA National Model were related to student educational outcomes. The authors used hierarchical linear regression and Pearson correlations to examine relationships between program characteristics and student outcomes. School counseling program…

The six statewide research studies presented in this special issue use a variety of designs, instrumentation, and measures. Nevertheless, they can be integrated at the level of results to shed light on some important questions related to effective practice in the field of school counseling. In fact, one can argue that, when separate studies that…

Despite the critical importance of in-service education programs (INSETs) for teachers' on-going professional development, educators often report problems concerning many INSETs. However, due to lack of systematic evaluation studies of INSETs in especially language education field, specific problems in these courses cannot be diagnosed, and they…

The quantitative methodologies have been traditionally employed in the educational research so far. However, as long as with the appreciation and widespread use of the qualitative methodologies in many disciplines, many different educational areas have started to be examined in terms of qualitative research aspects. Particularly, the qualitative…

"Campuses in general are paying much more attention to sustainability," says Paul Rowland, executive director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, which is dedicated to empowering colleges and universities to lead the sustainability transformation in society. Rowland says that in the past four…

As Canadian universities are pressured to exhibit a range of organizational accountabilities, their various academic, administrative, and support units are required to adopt more integrated and inclusive approaches to assessment and planning. Within the purview of university continuing education units, individual program areas are expected to not…

Family law proceedings encompass a broad range of issues, including custody, maintenance, support, valuation, visitation, relocation, and termination of parental rights. The following guidelines address what are commonly termed child custody evaluations, involving disputes over decision making, caretaking, and access in the wake of marital or…

Developed in 1999 by teams of faculty, staff, and students, Clarion "Transitions" is a multi-year student success program designed to increase student retention at a public university in western Pennsylvania. Clarion "Transitions": Exploration is a credit-bearing, peer/faculty-facilitated co-curricular that engages freshmen in…

Educational program assessment studies often use data from low-stakes tests to provide evidence of program quality. The validity of scores from such tests, however, is potentially threatened by examinee noneffort. This study investigated the extent to which one type of noneffort--rapid-guessing behavior--distorted the results from three types of…