Given decision-makers often prioritize causal research that identifies the impact of treatments on the people they serve, a key question in education research is, "Does it work?". Today, however, researchers are paying increasing attention to successive questions that are equally important from a practical standpoint--not only does it…

Program alignment with professional standards ensures that students gain competency-based skills that can be transferred to the workplace environment. Employers continue to place a greater value on these skills. Establishing curriculum alignment with professional standards can assist with annual program evaluations, student learning outcomes, and…

The use of complexity-based evaluation methods remains relatively underexplored in the field of evaluation. While increasingly employed to assess complex interventions, Contribution Analysis (CA) continues to suffer from a lack of operationalization. In this article, we propose enhancing the implementation of CA by leveraging Participatory Systems…

Evaluators often lament that the general public does not understand what we do. Yet, there is limited empirical research on what the general public does know--and think--about program evaluation. This article seeks to expand our understanding in this domain by capturing views about evaluation from a demographically representative sample of the U.S…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to explore how the involvement of workplace teams in experimenting with changes in their work practices through short, time-boxed, experiments (STBEs) can support organizational learning. It is explored how staffs' experiences with experimental practices give rise to shared knowledge and how this is supported by…

The purpose of the present experiments was to systematically replicate Step it UP! Game interventions with adults with disabilities. Participants were divided into two competing teams, and the team with the highest step count participated in a prize drawing. Experiment 1 (N = 9) evaluated the efficacy of an extended version of the Step it UP! Game…

This applied research study aimed to improve teacher professional development to improve teacher's instructional practice. The need to improve teacher professional development arose from ineffective instructional practices and low academic achievement ratings. This applied research study incorporated an action plan with three elements to improve…

The rise of the digital era has led to a decline in handwriting as the primary mode of communication, resulting in negative effects on handwriting literacy, particularly in complex writing systems such as Chinese. The marginalization of handwriting has contributed to the deterioration of penmanship, defined as the ability to write aesthetically…

Interest in trauma-informed approaches in schools is high throughout the US, UK, Australia, Canada and other countries, but the empirical evidence on whole-school responses to trauma is limited. This conceptual and theoretical review explores relevant literature; outlines existing conceptual models for trauma-informed organisations, including…

Student equity program evaluation is an emerging field of practice in the Australian higher education sector. Driven by reporting requirements from the Department of Education, it is incentivised through targeted funding provided by the Australian Centre for Student Equity and Success (ACSES). Currently, the evaluation capability of equity…

The International Leadership Association's General Principles for Leadership Programs provides a useful frame for developing, delivering, and assessing leadership programs. In doing so, it is important for leadership scholars, educators, and practitioners to acknowledge and reflect on the complexities of our world, which moves toward strategies to…

The recognition that researcher discretion coupled with unconscious biases and motivated reasoning sometimes leads to false findings ("p-hacking") led to the broad embrace of study preregistration and other open-science practices in experimental research. Paradoxically, the preregistration of quasi-experimental studies remains uncommon…

Power has always been an element of the program evaluation field, however, it has traditionally been attributed a negative connotation. With that in mind, power is seen as a force possessed to some extent by different stakeholders that can be imposed over others, and by which certain views, ideas, and decisions can be adopted. Given that program…

The goal of this concurrent, equal status mixed methods study was to investigate the potential differences between EdD and PhD programs in the United States with the following overarching research question: Are there differences in EdD and PhD programs in schools that have both programs? Data were collected from 34 university websites where both a…

This study explored the overall training experiences of the first cohort of school psychology students in China, examining how the program's coursework and initial practicum supported their competency development, as well as the challenges they encountered. Using a culturally adapted competency framework, the study assessed all first-cohort…