This paper was prepared as a response to: (1) A national trend towards lessening the requirements to become a public school superintendent and hiring non-traditional superintendents. State and national approaches to alternative licensure for public school superintendents are reviewed, including the lessening or abolition of standards. This is of…

Regional Educational Laboratory Southwest conducted this literature review to identify malleable factors that can be measured in K-12 settings and that predict students' postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) success (defined as enrolling in, persisting in, and completing a postsecondary STEM major or degree), particularly…

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value-added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM…

The study investigates the effect of e-learning, blended learning and classroom learning on students' achievement. Two experimental groups together with a control group from Umm Al-Qura University in Saudi Arabia were identified randomly. To assess students' achievement in the different groups, pre- and post-achievement tests were used. The…

This paper is directed to researchers who conduct and report education intervention studies. Its purpose is to stimulate and guide them to go a step beyond reporting the statistics that emerge from their analysis of the differences between experimental groups on the respective outcome variables. With what is often very minimal additional effort,…

As schools turn to data-driven decision making to improve student achievement, research is playing an increasingly important role in local policy making. Researchers have worked to help policy makers better "understand" research with a focus on research design and method. How to better "use" research, however, has received little attention. This…

The Tennessee General Assembly passed legislation in 2007 requiring that the State Board of Education produce an assessment on the effectiveness of teacher training programs. The law requires that the report include data on the performance of each program's graduates in the following areas: placement and retention rates, Praxis II results, and…

California, Florida, Illinois, New York, and Texas enroll close to 40 percent of the nation's public school students. The importance of these "Mega-States" goes beyond the sheer size of their population. They now serve more than half of the nation's English language learners (ELL), as well as some of the largest concentrations of…

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. Prior studies (see Tuttle et al. 2013) have consistently found that attending a KIPP middle school positively affects student achievement, but few have addressed longer-term…

KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) is a national network of public charter schools whose stated mission is to help underserved students enroll in and graduate from college. Prior studies (see Tuttle et al. 2013) have consistently found that attending a KIPP middle school positively affects student achievement, but few have addressed longer-term…

Only one-third of all students who enter community colleges with the intent to earn a degree or certificate actually meet this goal within six years. MDRC launched the Opening Doors Demonstration in 2003--the first large-scale random assignment study in a community college setting--to tackle this problem. Partnering with six community colleges,…

Process-oriented guided-inquiry learning (POGIL), a pedagogical technique initially developed for college chemistry courses, has been implemented for 2 yr in a freshman-level anatomy and physiology course at a small private college. The course is populated with students with backgrounds ranging from no previous college-level science to junior and…

In an era of intense state and federal accountability for teaching and student learning, school principals face noteworthy challenges which typically work against recommending contract non-renewal for teachers. School principals confront tremendous pressure from state and federal accountability legislation to produce evidence of student learning…

This methodological brief introduces the readers to the propensity score matching method, which can be used for enhancing the validity of causal inferences in research situations involving nonexperimental design or observational research, or in situations where the benefits of an experimental design are not fully realized because of reasons beyond…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is a continuing and nationally representative assessment of what this nation's students know and can do. NAEP has often been called the "gold standard" of assessments because it is developed using the best thinking of assessment and content specialists, education experts, and…