Plans for curriculum or pedagogical innovation often lead to little change in practice. Many innovations successful in their early stages fail later, with little post-innovation analysis to understand why. In Scotland, in 2001, the Scottish Executive Education Department initiated the Assessment is for Learning (AifL) programme. Recognising…

If a district head or state superintendent wanted to intensify the focus of his curriculum on 21st century skills, he would do well to pay a visit to Tucson's Catalina Foothills School District (CFSD). There on the Arizona city's northeastern edge, educators and administrators have decided to go all in on 21st century skills, and in so doing have…

Sample surveys are widely used in the social sciences and business. The news media almost daily quote from them, yet they are widely misused. Using students with prior managerial experience embarking on an MBA course, we show that common sample survey results are misunderstood even by those managers who have previously done a statistics course. In…

This article provides an introduction to the kind of computer software that is used to score student writing in some high stakes testing programs, and that is being promoted as a teaching and learning tool to schools. It sketches the state of play with machines for the scoring of writing, and describes how these machines work and what they do.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how coaches perceived and responded to the content knowledge and assessment processes that they were exposed to during an advanced level soccer coaching award programme. In-depth interviews were conducted with six coaches who had successfully completed the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)…

The author is increasingly sensitive to the Venn diagram of overlapping expertise in which program evaluation intersects a content area such as public health, urban education, or--in the case of Katherine Hay--international development. Many evaluators practice in these areas of overlap, experts in the evaluation of a specific domain. Given her…

The capacity of any professional development effort to achieve durable change in teacher practice is affected by a host of design factors and their precise alignment with multiple delivery strategies. However, how successful professional development (PD) programs achieve an effective mix of these factors and strategies is not well understood. The…

This article presents propensity score matching as a method to implement randomized conditions to analyze service effects using nonexperimental data. Most social work research is challenged to implement randomized clinical trials, whereas administrative and survey data are often available and can provide valuable information about services…

The "No Child Left Behind Act of 2001" (PL 107-110) established the Reading First (RF) Program (Title I, Part B, Subpart 1), a major Federal initiative designed to help ensure that all children can read at or above grade level by the end of third-grade. The legislation (Section 1205 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) requires…

Policy decision makers, early educators, and early interventionists face numerous challenges as they develop and implement statewide accountability systems to evaluate and improve children's early intervention and early childhood special education outcomes. Kansas was an early adopter of the Child Outcomes Summary Form (COSF) developed by the…

The second edition of "Professional Issues in Therapeutic Recreation: On Competence and Outcomes" is greatly expanded to include a wider variety of introductory materials and updates on current professional issues. The second edition represents a timely review of the state of affairs in the profession of therapeutic recreation. This book contains…

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…

The concept of treatment integrity cuts across a diversity of fields involved with providing treatments or interventions to individuals. In medical treatments, the concept of "treatment compliance" or "treatment adherence" is an important and problematic issue. In the field of nutrition, the concept of "dietary adherence" is important for…

Automated scoring models for the "e-rater"® scoring engine were built and evaluated for the "GRE"® argument and issue-writing tasks. Prompt-specific, generic, and generic with prompt-specific intercept scoring models were built and evaluation statistics such as weighted kappas, Pearson correlations, standardized difference in…

Designed around a practical "practice-what-you-teach" approach to methods instruction, "Your Science Classroom: Becoming an Elementary/Middle School Science Teacher" is based on current constructivist philosophy, organized around 5E inquiry, and guided by the National Science Education Teaching Standards. Written in a reader-friendly style, the…