This manuscript aims to answer the research question: What data are collected by teacher residency programs and a network of teacher residency programs, and how and why do faculty and NCTR staff use this data to advance both individual programs and the teacher residency model nationally? This paper explores how individual teacher residency…

Home visiting connects expectant parents, new caregivers, and their young children with a support person, called a home visitor. The home visitor meets regularly with the family, develops a relationship with them, and supports them to achieve their goals and meet their needs. To reach the thousands of additional families who could benefit from…

State education departments find themselves pressured to reduce costs while improving student performance. To do so, state education departments must measure the performance of each school district in an objective, data-informed manner. We present a benchmarking methodology and illustrate its application in New York State school districts. We…

Due to educational policy, data use in schools is a widespread method of school improvement, yet results remain inconsistent. Across the literature, the school leader is a key determinant of the effectiveness of data use. This study sought to shed light on the role of the school leader in data use through a mixed methods case study. The study…

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the implementation and impacts of the Building Assets, Reducing Risks (BARR) model in its first year of implementation in 66 schools across the U.S. and to document scale-up progress during the Investing in Innovation (i3) grant period (2017-2021). The impact evaluation included 21,529 9th grade students…

Social return on investment (SROI) offers a new strategy to measure and communicate the value of outcomes achieved by programs that provide social, health, and education services to children and their families. It can be a powerful tool for demonstrating the monetary value of programs and services and for communicating that value in a way that can…

Social return on investment (SROI) analysis offers a practical new approach for measuring and communicating the value of outcomes achieved by programs that provide social, health, and educational services to children and their families. This guide highlights the key steps in conducting SROI research, issues in data-gathering and analysis, as well…

Over the past decades, Vincent Tinto, Edmund Thile, Francis Ianni, and others all link mentoring to better academic performance, improved social adjustment, enhanced academic experiences, and greater rates of degree completion. Even more specifically, Jean E. Rhodes, Renée Spencer, Thomas E. Keller, Belle Liang, and Gil Noam describe three…

The Pittsburgh Promise is a scholarship program that provides $5,000 per year toward college tuition for public high school graduates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who earned a 2.5 GPA and a 90% attendance record. This study used a difference-in-difference design to assess whether the introduction of the Promise scholarship program directly…

Charter schools were developed, in part, to serve as an R&D engine for traditional public schools, resulting in a wide variety of school strategies and outcomes. In this paper, we collect unparalleled data on the inner-workings of 35 charter schools and correlate these data with credible estimates of each school's effectiveness. We find that…

A new online tool called "Science Pipes" allows students to conduct biodiversity investigations. With this free tool, students create and run analyses that would otherwise require access to unwieldy data sets and the ability to write computer code. Using these data, students can conduct guided inquiries or hypothesis-driven research to…

The Research Alliance for New York City Schools examined Department of Education (DOE) School Survey data from 2008-2010 to better understand the richness and complexities of the information elicited by the Survey from parents, students, and teachers. This report provides background information on the development of the NYC School Surveys during…

The Research Alliance for New York City Schools examined Department of Education (DOE) School Survey data from 2008-2010 to better understand the richness and complexities of the information elicited by the Survey from parents, students, and teachers. This document provides the appendices to the technical report "New York City School Survey…

SWAT (Student Weekend Arborist Team) is a program affiliated with Cornell University and Extension founded to conduct street tree inventories in New York State communities with 10,000 residents or fewer, a group of communities underserved in community forestry planning. Between 2002 and 2010, SWAT conducted 40 inventories, and data from these…

Human service practitioners face challenges in communicating how their programs lead to desired outcomes. One framework for representation that is now widely used in the field of program evaluation is the program logic model. This article presents an example of how qualitative data were used to refine a logic model for the Cornell Family…