Education experiments frequently assign students to treatment or control conditions within schools. Longitudinal components added in these studies (e.g., students followed over time) allow researchers to assess treatment effects in average rates of change (e.g., linear or quadratic). We provide methods for a priori power analysis in three-level…

Purpose: A growing trend in instructional improvement efforts is the use of formative assessment informed by research-based developmental trajectories of how students gain deeper understanding of subject matter content over time. This article reports the findings of a large-scale experimental study of an innovative mathematics professional…

Understanding how evaluation audiences perceive credibility can help evaluators design evaluations and reports that support appropriate use. While researchers have studied credibility assessment among various educational stakeholders, little research has been conducted with the broader public. This study explored potential factors affecting the…

It is a challenge for business students or even employees to understand business processes and enterprise software usage without involvement in real-world practices. Many business schools are using ERP software in their curriculum, aiming to expose students to real-world business practices. ERPsim is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)…

The basic currency of higher education--the credit hour--represents the root of many problems plaguing America's higher education system: the practice of measuring time rather than learning. "Cracking the Credit Hour" traces the history of this time-based unit, from the days of Andrew Carnegie to recent federal efforts to define a credit…

This paper reports on a case-study design experiment in the domain of fraction as number-measure. We designed and implemented a set of exploratory tasks concerning comparison and ordering of fractions as well as operations with fractions. Two groups of 12-year-old students worked collaboratively using paper and pencil as well as a specially…

This paper provides a guide to the minimum size of treatment groups, inferred from the relationships between pupil norms and norms for class averages of standardized achievement tests. (Editor)

Documenting treatment integrity is an important issue in research and practice in any discipline concerned with prevention and intervention. However, consensus concerning the dimensions of treatment integrity and how they should be measured has yet to emerge. Advances from three areas in which significant treatment integrity work has taken…

Intended for both researchers and practitioners, this review analyzes literature on educational accountability and performance contracting. It defines the concepts, describes certain individual contracts completed or in progress, discusses the use of management systems and safeguards, identifies some testing and measurement problems, and probes…

This report represents an integration of analysis results in an interim report with those from additional analyses performed since. It is divided into (1) description of the experiment in which the goal is outlined; (2) description of the technology company programs, an overview of personnel, curriculum and materials, and incentive systems; (3)…

This report summarizes the principal findings for the O.E.O. experiment in performance contracting. The report emphasizes major results and conclusions to date. It is divided into (1) description of the experiment, in which the goal is outlined; (2) description of the technology company programs, curriculum and materials, and overviews of…

The paper discusses an experiment in which regression analysis was used to examine predictors of information retention following a college economics course. It was hypothesized that students taught in small classes with self-instructional materials would place a higher value on basic economic concepts and retain these concepts longer than students…