The science education budget of many secondary schools has decreased, while shortages and environmental concerns linked to conventional Science Education Equipment and Materials (SEEMs) have emerged. Thus, in some schools, resourceful educators produce low-cost equipment from basic materials and use these so-called improvised SEEMs in practical…

Recent demographic, economic and political trends have drawn attention to the issue of effectiveness and efficiency in the use of resources in the education sector. In the context of the renewed interest for the optimisation of resource use, this paper attempts to review the literature on budgeting and accounting in OECD education systems. The…

The Department for Education (DfE) commissioned Kantar Public and Learning and Work Institute (L&W) to undertake research to understand adults' experiences of, and decisions about, learning. This report presents the findings from in-depth interviews with 70 learners and focus groups with 16 adults not currently learning, and recommendations…

This article provides snapshots of teacher leadership in action as one result of the Asheville (N.C.) City Schools Foundation Innovation Fellows program, an approach to providing high quality professional learning for the district's best teachers. With start-up funding from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, this program was created to retain great…

The Preservation Health Check (PHC) project, undertaken as a joint effort by Open Planets Foundation (OPF) and OCLC Research, aims to evaluate the usefulness of the preservation metadata created and maintained by operational repositories for assessing basic preservation properties. The PHC project seeks to develop an implementable logic to support…

Today's researchers seek to determine if contemporary pre-K programs provide the strong return on investment found by researchers in the 1960's High/Scope Perry Preschool Program and 1970's North Carolina Abecedarian Project. Research then showed that these two programs created positive academic effects that accompanied their students as they…

Higher education is deploying a range of innovative strategies in response to rising costs and financial challenges. This report presents findings from a NASPA [National Association of Student Personnel Administrators] study on cost-saving initiatives at three institutions. Each institution aimed to creatively address different areas affecting…

Effective use of technology in areas that include admissions, record keeping, billing, compliance, athletic administration, and more hold untold potential to transform higher education by introducing significant efficiencies and dramatic cost reductions in serving students. How the institution organizes itself will to a large extent depend on how…

Low- and middle-income countries often have limited resources, underdeveloped health systems and scarce knowledge of autism spectrum disorder. The objectives of this preliminary study were to develop and adapt intervention materials and to train a native clinician to implement a community-based parent-mediated behavioural intervention in rural…

This study explored the cost-effectiveness and return-on-investment of a combined social and physical environmental worksite health promotion program compared with usual practice, and of both intervention conditions separately. Participants were randomized to the combined intervention (n = 92), social environmental intervention (n = 118), physical…

Stackable credentials--sequential postsecondary awards that allow individuals to progress on a career path--have been suggested as a way to enhance the labor market prospects of middle-skill workers. Yet, thus far, little evidence has been provided on the economic value of these credentials. Here, we report a series of estimates on the association…

This report presents the findings of the cost-benefit analysis of Accelerating Opportunity, an initiative designed to help adults with low basic skills earn industry-recognized credentials in high-growth occupations and succeed in the labor market. It compares the value of the benefits associated with AO--principally labor market benefits--with…

Organizations increasingly utilize cloud computing architectures to reduce costs and energy consumption both in the data warehouse and on mobile devices by better utilizing the computing resources available. However, the security and privacy issues with publicly available cloud computing infrastructures have not been studied to a sufficient depth…

For years, faculty members have pointed to the sluggish growth in the number of tenured professors and complained that university payrolls are filled with too many administrators. This, they maintain, adds unnecessary costs and takes the focus away from teaching and learning. But whether such "administrative bloat" is really occurring and how much…

This article describes the development and psychometric properties of the Community Impact Scale (CIS), a measure of benefits and costs of community-university partnerships across a range of outcomes as perceived by community partners. Scale development was carried out in two phases: (a) item generation, through which the research team, in close…