Background/Context: Community colleges are central to the United States' college completion goals. A popular strategy pushed by a number of influential policy organizations and foundations is a policy of tying state funding to community college completions, otherwise known simply as performance funding. This is happening despite little to no…

In today's rapidly changing global economy, "21st century skills" means much more than proficiency in basic academic subjects. One of the most important noncognitive competencies for student success is conscientiousness, which encompasses traits such as perseverance, self-regulation, resilience, and responsibility. Researchers have found…

Most special education administrators do not get the chance to network regularly with professional peers to discuss job challenges and strategies. School-district special education directors routinely juggle complex, difficult, time-consuming, and emotion-laden job demands, but when things get tough, they usually find themselves solving problems…

Linking teacher practice to pupil outcomes has proven challenging for teacher educators. Methodological problems occur when linking individual teacher actions with subsequent pupil performance, including substantial intervening variables, questions about appropriate measures of student learning, issues regarding the lack of test standardization…

In this paper, an attempt has been made to propose a measuring instrument known as EduQUAL for evaluation of quality in Technical Education System (TES). Factor analysis has been carried out on responses obtained through cross-sectional questionnaire survey on various items to validate dimensionality of the instrument and it is found that 28 items…

Purpose: As funds have increased for the provision of in-home care, so too have concerns about the quality of services. In response, care management agencies and home-care providers have developed an array of monitoring activities designed to ensure the quality of services. In this article, we show how an area agency on aging both collected and…

The Montana Autism Education Project (MAEP), that started in 2010, aimed to: (a) increase teacher knowledge of Evidence-Based Practices (EBPs), (b) provide on-site technical assistance and peer-to-peer collaboration, (c) develop sustainable support for teachers across Montana, and (d) develop inter-agency collaboration between the project and…

Cherryvale Secondary School is located in a small, rural city. Mike Randall has been the principal there for three years. Each year principals are required by the school district to devise a School Improvement Plan. In Mike's first year, he chose a social justice goal, focusing on "Student Success on a Case-by-Case Basis." Mike and…

EducationWorks (EW) contracted with Research for Action (RFA) to research and evaluate its socialized recess (SR) program conducted by Education-Works/National School and Community Corps (NSCC) teams which are based full-time in individual public schools. The purpose of this research was to give EW/NSCC deeper insights into the accomplishments and…

Human service fields, and more specifically public health, are increasingly requiring evaluations to prove the worth of funded programs. Many public health practitioners, however, lack the required background and skills to conduct useful, appropriate evaluations. In the late 1990s, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created the…

Back in 2000, Charles Best was teaching at Wings Academy, an alternative high school in the Bronx, when he got the idea for a Web site where teachers could solicit donations for class projects. With help from his students, DonorsChoose.org soon was born. Last year, the site won Amazon.com's Nonprofit Innovation Award. So far, DonorsChoose has…

This is the third of three volumes that constitute the final evaluation report of Project STAR (State Technical Assistance Resources), an undertaking of the Maryland State Department of Education designed to help 36 elementary schools improve their reading programs. This volume is the project handbook and contains information concerning the…

Policy makers' attempts to improve low-achieving schools through reform measures are not new to the 21st century. Research asserts that this policy churn has done little, if anything, to change student achievement levels. Based on the research, I assert that policy reforms such as teacher evaluations and test-based assessment, and school…

One of the greatest challenges that community colleges face in their efforts to increase graduation rates is improving the success of students in their developmental, or remedial, education programs--the courses that students without adequate academic preparation must take before they can enroll in courses for college credit. Emphasizing results…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to describe how one US Midwestern university implements quality principles, based on the value added premise in a teacher preparation program that yields accountability, teacher education standards attainment and ultimately improvement of teacher candidates and overall programs. Design/methodology/approach:…