We report on an effectiveness evaluation of the Youth Empowerment Solutions (YES) program. YES applies empowerment theory to an after-school program for middle school students. YES is an active learning curriculum designed to help youth gain confidence in themselves, think critically about their community, and work with adults to create positive…

This study examined eight variables of the Teaching Age-Appropriate Personal Skills (TAPS) checklist (Pogrund et al., 1995). The goal was to identify potential orientation and mobility (O&M) factors to represent constructs underlying the data that could be used in the future to better research the college readiness of youths who are visually…

In 2016, Dr. Martin Reinhardt and Dr. Jioanna Carjuzaa produced a series of three webinars concerning Indigenous language immersion programs. The first webinar focused on broad curriculum development ideas including core relationships, guidelines and principles for effective pedagogy, and models. The second webinar focused on the elements of…

Throughout the 1990s, Richard Reid of Michigan State University maintained a list showing the first programming language used in introductory programming courses taken by computer science and information systems majors; it was updated for several years afterwards by Frances Van Scoy of West Virginia University. However, it has been 5 years since…

This document presents a five-step process for schools, districts, and states to use in monitoring accommodations for instruction and assessment. This document was designed to be a companion to the "Council of Chief State School Officers' Accommodations Manual: How to Select, Administer, and Evaluate Use of Accommodations for Instruction and…

Virtually every school district in the country is dealing with the need to reduce their budget. The process used to make those decisions varies from state to state but almost always includes a combination of short and long-term approaches. In many school districts the emphasis is on reducing individual budget line items and not filling vacant…

This article advances the literature on assessment of EFNEP's effectiveness. Factor analysis of Behavior Checklist items were performed to arrive at a parsimonious set of constructs used to assess the effects of program attributes on participants' behavior change. Based on the data from Michigan EFNEP, the use of constructs demonstrated a robust…

Using a quasiexperimental design, the authors examine whether fourth- and fifth-grade students exposed to a developmental physical education (PE) curriculum, Michigan's Exemplary Physical Education Curriculum (EPEC), demonstrated stronger motor skill--specific self-efficacy and perceptions of physical activity competence, physical activity levels,…

Over the past 6 years, the Oral History Project Team has conducted interviews with individuals who have influenced the theory and practice of evaluation. In 2006, Robin Miller, with the help of Christian Coryn of The Evaluation Center at Western Michigan University (WMU), and Daniela Schroeter, also at the Center, sat down with widely regarded…

For those concerned with school improvement, resource-oriented mechanisms are a critical facet of efforts to transform and restructure daily operations. Resource-oriented organizational mechanisms focus specifically on ensuring the appropriate use of existing resources and enhancing efforts to address barriers to student learning. This report…

It is time for reform advocates to expand their emphasis on improving instruction and school management to include a comprehensive component for addressing barriers to learning. In doing so, they must pursue this third component with the same level of priority they devote to the other two. That is, such an enabling (or learner support) component…

This resource toolkit for working education service providers contains four sections. Section 1, "Roles Responsibilities, and Relationships," contains: (1) "Purchasing Services from an Educational Management Organization," excerpted from "The Charter School Administrative and Governance Guide" (Massachusetts Dept. of…