The concept of connected learning proposes that youth leverage individual interest and social media to drive learning with an academic focus. To illustrate, we present in-depth case studies of Ryan and Sam, two middle-school-age youth, to document an out-of-school intervention intended to direct toward intentional learning in STEM that taps…

This study evaluates the impact of an intervention on business school graduates' employability comprising of a curriculum-based career management skills (CMS) module and an industrial placement year. The study uses data from the destinations of leavers of higher education survey to examine the employability of different groups within the cohort…

This study applies a diagnostic errors framework to identify and classify mistakes that were made in a psychoeducational assessment of a bilingual student who was misidentified as a person with autism. Findings of diagnostic errors were categorized under four domains--faulty knowledge, faulty data gathering, faulty data processing, and faulty…

This paper examines the achievement levels of students undertaking the Tertiary Enabling Program (TEP) at La Trobe University. The TEP is an alternative pathway program that traverses multiple institutions, campuses, and disciplinary areas, and is designed to prepare a diverse student cohort for tertiary study. The Program integrates several…

The central question in this study is whether the language and math delays of the different socio-economic and ethnic minority groups targeted by Dutch educational disadvantage policy have diminished or not. Data are from the years 1995, 1999, 2003 and 2008. Information from a total of 90,000 pupils in Grades 2 and 8 was selected to represent the…

The "Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006" ("Perkins IV") sets a minimum allocation requirement that secondary and postsecondary career and technical education (CTE) subgrantees must achieve to receive federal financing. An eligible recipient with an allocation below the funding threshold may obtain a…

We study the link between parental selection and children criminality in a new context. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany experienced an unprecedented temporary drop in fertility driven by economic uncertainty. We exploit this natural experiment to estimate that the children from these (smaller) cohorts are 40 percent more likely to…

Race to the Top (RTT) is a first-of-its kind $4.35 billion competitive grant program designed to spur state-level education innovation to boost student achievement, close achievement gaps, and prepare students for college and careers. Originally authorized in 2009 under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, RTT encourages states to develop…

A growing body of research supports the idea that large scale school reform efforts often fail to create sustained change within the public school sector. Proponents of school reform argue that implementing school reform, effectively and with fidelity, can work to ensure the success of reform initiatives in public education. When implementing deep…

Academic libraries are currently facing their greatest challenge since the explosion in tertiary education and academic publishing, which began after World War II. The global digital revolution is affecting both the traditional forms of the creation, organisation, and dissemination of knowledge, and the world of tertiary education itself. In the…

Maintaining comparability of test scores is a major challenge faced by testing programs that have almost continuous administrations. Among the potential problems are scale drift and rapid accumulation of errors. Many standard quality control techniques for testing programs, which can effectively detect and address scale drift for small numbers of…

We analyzed over 100,000 student evaluations of instruction over 4 years in the college of business at a major public university. We found that the original instrument that was validated about 20 years ago is still valid, with factor analysis showing that the six underlying dimensions used in the instrument remained relatively intact. Also, we…

Background: In the past decade, there has been an increasing national policy push for educators to systematically collect, interpret, and use data for instructional decision making. The assumption by the federal government is that having data systems will be enough to prompt the use of data for a wide range of decision making. These policies rely…

Assessing student learning often promotes anxiety among students--and among teachers--not only because they worry about the results but because the items tested do not seem to reflect what students have learned. When assessment is student centered, however, it can promote learning and even motivation. Student-centered assessment shares many…

This report uses the Civil Rights Data Collection dataset released in early 2012 to raise questions and drive debate about the subject of teacher absence. This dataset comes from the first national survey to include school-level information on teacher absence. The measure constructed from this information is the percentage of teachers who were…