Computer assisted guidance systems may adapt well to various models of academic advising, and they have the ability to address the challenge of meeting the diverse advising needs of community college students without sacrificing the integrity of academic advising (Fowkes & McWhirter, 2007). The purpose of this qualitative case study was to assess…

The purpose of this study was to explore the relevance that executive mentors' Dream journeys had for their mentoring practices. Dream journeys are the visions of where young adults see themselves in the future, and how they integrate themselves into the adult world over time. It was anticipated that a better understanding of executive mentors'…

This article describes an evaluation that was judged to be unsuccessful from the point of view of key program stakeholders. This was due to the fact that the evaluation did not support program advocates who had much to gain from positive evaluation findings. We argue that, although the knowledge needs of stakeholders must be taken into account,…

We evaluated the feasibility and utility of a laboratory model for examining observer accuracy within the framework of signal-detection theory (SDT). Sixty-one individuals collected data on aggression while viewing videotaped segments of simulated teacher-child interactions. The purpose of Experiment 1 was to determine if brief feedback and…

Group decision making is essential in organizations. Group Support Systems (GSS) can aide groups in making decisions by providing tools and process support. GSS is especially useful for geographically or temporally distributed groups. Researchers of GSS have pointed out that convergence processes are hard to accomplish in GSS. Voting tools in GSS…

The use of theory-driven evaluation is an emerging practice in the military--an aspect generally unknown in the civilian evaluation community. First developed during the 1991 Gulf War and applied in both the Balkans and Afghanistan, these techniques are now being examined in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as a means to evaluate the…

The Hint Factory is an implementation of our novel method to automatically generate hints using past student data for a logic tutor. One disadvantage of the Hint Factory is the time needed to gather enough data on new problems in order to provide hints. In this paper we describe the use of expert sample solutions to "seed" the hint generation…

Solving America's dropout crisis requires immediate, drastic action. Intractable as the dropout problem may seem, recognition of its magnitude has created an environment ripe for action. Most notably, federal regulations adopted in 2008 require states to use more accurate ways of counting dropouts and holding districts and schools more accountable…

Surveillance video recording is becoming ubiquitous in daily life for public areas such as supermarkets, banks, and airports. The rate at which surveillance video is being generated has accelerated demand for machine understanding to enable better content-based search capabilities. Analyzing human activity is one of the key tasks to understand and…

More than 25% of new college students begin their higher education careers outside of the traditional fall start date (National Student Clearinghouse, 2012). This study examines the social, personal, and academic experiences of spring admits at a large, private research institution in the western United States. In this study, a spring admit is…

Faced with rising demand for information about early childhood programs, states need to find tools and strategies to monitor the progress of and to identify high-quality early childhood programs. In response, REL Mid-Atlantic convened a regional workgroup for state personnel who work with the systems containing early childhood data. The workgroup…

During a time when most institutions of higher education are in search of underrepresented student participation, Georgia State University (GSU), a majority White institution, has observed a lack of involvement of White students in co-curricular activities. The purpose of the research study was to critically examine White students' (dis)…

Improving student performance for high-need student populations by improving the use of data in decision-making for early reading intervention programs in northwest Florida is the focus of this research to practice effort. The study is conceptually based on using a relational-feedback intervention (RFI) database model in early learning…

The National Association of State Directors of Special Education (NASDSE, 2005) defines response to intervention (RTI) as the practice of providing high-quality instruction and intervention based on a student's needs, changing instruction and/or goals through frequent monitoring of progress, and applying the student response data to important…

Background: Social workers entering the profession typically receive little, if any, content or training on evaluation practice. This is, in part, due to limited course offerings outside of the typical courses in most schools of social work. In addition, practicing social workers who often serve in the role as field instructors have not fully…