This paper reports on the results of a research-practice partnership that included a U.S. university research team and a state-funded grants program that supports informal science education. The goal of the 2-year partnership was to develop an empirically-tested model for collaboration and capacity-building (CCB) in support of collective…

Research-practice-partnerships (RPPs) have arisen as a potentially powerful mechanism for school improvement; however, there is little work how to evaluate RPPs. This study investigates how four RPPs are addressing impact by (a) document analysis of metrics (N = 123) being used to assess partnerships, and (b) interviews exploring how network leads…

A method called multi-attribute utility analysis (MAUA) provides a decision-making framework that facilitates comparative analysis of multiple real-world decision alternatives with unique complex attributes. Utility analysis as a measure of effectiveness has been minimally used by educational researchers to date, despite clear relevance in complex…

Children in Liberia receive 2.2 learning-adjusted years of schooling, one of the lowest levels of educational attainment in the world. We study one approach to address low enrollment and low rates of learning: a 10-month accelerated learning program run by the Luminos Fund to help out-of-school children catch up to grade level. We conducted a…

The foster youth education program strives to increase graduation rates by improving academic performance and encouraging student retention through an innovative collaboration between tutors, social workers, and schools to provide individualized support. The pilot program was funded by U.S. Department of Education Innovation Funds, which evolving…

Given the common problem of incoherence in district reform efforts, this qualitative study sought to understand what conditions enable (and/or constrain) the efforts of Technical Assistance Organizations (TAOs) to align their products and services with each other and with the specific goals of a district. This paper explores the complexity of TAOs…

More than 5 million adults lack both functional literacy (below level 1) and numeracy (below entry level 3); an estimated 11.5 million adults do not have basic digital skills; and one in five adults do not have basic financial capabilities. Around 850,000 people have English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) needs. At the same time,…

Meaningful and sustained assessment is best achieved when a campus unit takes a collaborative leadership role to work with other departments, offices, and groups. Simply developing and implementing assessment in isolation and for the unit itself is not enough. While the value of collaboration among diverse campus constituents is widely recognized,…

Funders, policymakers, and program leaders recognize the value of high-quality evidence. To make good use of a program evaluation, initiatives must contend with a set of fundamental questions first. Some of these are about the initiative itself: What outcomes does it seek to affect? Are daily activities in line with long-term goals? Others are…

These appendices describe the matching process used to identify an appropriate set of comparison schools for use in the report evaluating Year 2 of the Expanded Success Initiative, "Changing How High Schools Serve Black and Latino Young Men." As described in Chapter 2 of the report, selecting schools similar to ESI schools to serve as a…

An important feature of professional development school (PDS) work is encouraging collaborative reflective dialogue that guides a partnership toward actualizing the possibilities for and mission of a PDS. This article provides a case "illustration" of a fictitious, exemplary PDS and a "protocol" that in combination can be used…

As a necessary preliminary for this issue on Illinois' experience with school-university partnerships to provide teacher development opportunities, this article provides a review of the literature relevant to such programs. As the evaluation and assessment have changed over the years since the Eisenhower grants period, the author explains the…

This article presents findings from an action research that explored industrial attachment supervision and assessment issues and concerns of CUT's (Chinhoyi University of Technology) undergraduate degree programme. The study was motivated by the observation that there is no research project contacted in order to determine the social and economic…

Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation (ECMHC) has been linked to increased teacher competence and efficacy, as well as increased social skills and decreased challenging behaviors for participating children (Green, 2009). Partnerships for Early Childhood Mental Health ("Partnerships") is an ECMHC program in Southeastern Ohio. This…

Program evaluation is recognized as an essential skill set for practitioners in service-related fields, such as education, nonprofit management, social work, and public health. Recently, the need for a public workforce trained in evaluation has increased and is driven primarily by our nation's emphasis on accountability during a time when…