This paper reports partial results from a larger study of how three different groups of stakeholders--university admissions officers, faculty in graduate programs involved in admissions decisions, and Intensive English Program (IEP) faculty--interpret and use TOEFL iBT® scores in making admissions decisions or preparing students to meet minimum…

Functional plans in early childhood intervention need to include contextualized, meaningful, and measurable goals and include timelines and criteria for generalization. In addition, they must address children's and families' needs and priorities. The Routines-Based Interview has had a positive impact on the functionality of goals identified in the…

Peer evaluation consists of the evaluation of students by their peers following criteria or rubrics provided by the teacher, where the way to evaluate students is specified so that they achieve the desired competencies. The quality of the measurement instrument must meet two essential criteria: validity and reliability. In this research, we…

In considering whether to retain the GRE in graduate school admissions, admissions committees often pursue two objectives: (a) performance in graduate school (e.g., admitting individuals who will perform better in classes and research), and (b) diversity/fairness (e.g., equal selection rates between demographic groups). Drawing upon HR research…

There is a contradiction of intensive national policy efforts and the slow pace of change in widening participation in England. This paper focuses on the use of contextual data in STEM subjects, where there has been less progress in widening access and a more rigid entry pathway through A-level study. Interviews with admissions tutors suggest a…

"Predatory" publishing is a non-binary academic phenomenon, but personal and professional biases may influence the criteria used to create associated blacklists and whitelists. Academic librarians, as scholarly communicators, play an essential role in transmitting accurate information about "predatory" publishing to students,…

This mixed research study focused on the selection criterion and guidelines used by the Higher Education Students Financing Board (HESFB) in granting students loan scheme to University Students in Uganda with a sample from Makerere University. Findings revealed that the majority of the loan beneficiaries are aware of these guidelines and one to…

Over the years, several frameworks and lesson observation protocols have been developed to ensure objectivity and consistency when determining the quality of a mathematics lesson. Frequently, the frameworks do not agree on the benchmarks for assessing and describing the quality of a lesson. This puts mathematics education researchers in a dilemma…

Coteaching, an alternative to traditional conceptions of student teaching in general teacher preparation, may be enhanced if researchers and practitioners achieve consensus with respect to operational definitions and descriptions of practice. The focus of this article is coassessing -- one component of coteaching -- where coteachers…

Complexity theory suggests that educational research should consider students' community contexts, because individual students' outcomes are interrelated with community characteristics. While some prior literature finds that higher education enrollment choices are influenced by geography, scholars have largely overlooked the importance of…

Purpose: This study aims to explore ways of developing, implementing and validating a new framework and criteria for self-evaluation of programme curricula, with specific reference to the quality assurance certification process in a particular case. Design/methodology/approach: The framework is developed using a case study research methodology and…

This dissertation demonstrates the interdisciplinary integration of critical appreciative inquiry (a qualitative planning process focused on inclusion in decision-making) and multi-attribute utility theory (a quantitative evaluation process focused on rationality in decision-making). Principles of positive psychology and decision-making underlay…

This dissertation consists of three chapters covering applications within Matching Theory. In the first chapter, we study the decentralized college admissions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), where students submit their applications to each college separately, and colleges use a ranking based on weighted centralized test scores. Unlike the…

Chi-square tests based on maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of covariance structures often incorrectly over-reject the null hypothesis: [sigma] = [sigma(theta)] when the sample size is small. Reweighted least squares (RLS) avoids this problem. In some models, the vector of parameter must contain means, variances, and covariances, yet whether RLS…

The admission process for many postsecondary institutions was not fundamentally designed to promote equity. It was especially not designed to put students' needs at the center of the process, let alone to give them decision-making power in institutional policies and practices. However, the year 2020--punctuated by a racial reckoning and global…