The search for necessary and sufficient causes of some outcome of interest, referred to as "configurational comparative research," has long been one of the main preoccupations of evaluation scholars and practitioners. However, only the last three decades have witnessed the evolution of a set of formal methods that are sufficiently…

Effective assessment practice requires clearly defining and operationalizing terminology. We illustrate the importance of this practice by focusing on academic "undermatching"--when students enroll in colleges that are less academically selective than those for which they are academically prepared. Undermatching has been viewed as a…

Karabatsos compared the power of 36 person-fit statistics using receiver operating characteristics curves and found the "H[superscript T]" statistic to be the most powerful in identifying aberrant examinees. He found three statistics, "C", "MCI", and "U3", to be the next most powerful. These four statistics,…

Teacher effectiveness varies substantially, yet principals' evaluations of teachers often fail to differentiate performance among teachers. We offer new evidence on principals' subjective evaluations of their teachers' effectiveness using two sources of data from a large, urban district: principals' high-stakes personnel evaluations of teachers,…

Some universal behavioural screening processes require classroom teachers to complete a risk assessment measure on each student in their class, leading to a possible, but unexplored, problem: risk assessment scores may be influenced by the teacher completing the measure. The current study investigated whether teacher-reported risk assessment…