This paper is a case study. It tells the story of the process that the Council on Accreditation for Parks, Recreation, Tourism and Related Professions beta test site created its learning outcomes assessment program. A planning process was used that has evolved from quality management philosophy and practice: DMADV. Use of DMADV required precise…

Responding to the challenge of more rigorous and outcome-oriented program evaluation criteria of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP), authors take a critical look at the intersection of two standards: Clinical Partnerships and Practice (Standard 2) and Program Impact (Standard 4). Illustrating one aspect of a secondary…

Learning communities have increasingly become a mechanism for education reform in elementary, secondary, and postsecondary education. Recognizing that learning occurs both inside and outside the classroom, their emergence is partly a response to the critique that undergraduate education at American research universities lacks integrated and…

The International Leadership Association's (ILA) Guiding Questions (2009) identify context as the foundational framework from which educators build successful leadership programs. Echoing sentiments from W. K. Kellogg's landmark study "Leadership in the Making" (Zimmerman-Oster and Burkhardt, 1999), context matters. Context includes tangible and…

With research indicating substantial differences among teachers in terms of their effectiveness (Nye, Konstantopoulous, & Hedges, 2004), a major focus of recent research in education has been on improving teacher quality through professional development (Desimone, 2009; Institute of Educations Sciences [IES], 2012; Measures of Effective…

Given limited funding for school-based science education, non-school-based programs have been developed at colleges and universities to increase the number of students entering science- and health-related careers and address critical workforce needs. However, few evaluations of such programs have been conducted. We report the design and methods of…

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project is the first major opportunity to use a behavioral economics lens to look at programs that serve poor and vulnerable people in the United States. Sponsored by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S.…

We assessed the relationship of level of QualityCore[R] implementation and student achievement in Algebra I. The study is based on 1,291 9th grade students in three large metropolitan school districts who took EXPLORE in the fall and the QualityCore Algebra I end-of-course assessment (EOC) in the spring. During the same period, the students' 41…

In a North Texas school district, students taking online courses in a variety of subject areas were not successfully completing courses at the district's expected levels. The district pays for courses and student support while remaining financially responsible to the community and programmatically to students' online success. Students'…

This paper presents a four-year longitudinal study of student teachers' beliefs about language learning and teaching over the course of an English teacher education (ELT) program. The study attempts to track possible changes in the beliefs and to analyze the impact of an ELT pre-service program by taking the program itself as a dynamic variable.…

Students enrolled in the author's commercial arts program design and publish the school's yearbook. For the 2010-2011 school year, the students applied Quick Response (QR) code technology to include links to events that occurred after the yearbook's print deadline, including graduation. The technology has many applications in the school setting,…

The introduction of outcomes-based vocational education in schools can have significant impact on the management and delivery of education and training. These impacts are not limited to classroom practice, and extend to the fields of policy and system coordination. This article reports on the results of a major trial of outcomes-oriented…

Universities in Europe have been playing an increasingly important role in the institutional evaluation of political and social systems for the last thirty years. Their major contribution to those processes of accountability has been to add methods and safeguards of evaluative research. In this paper we report an illustration of how evaluative…

The purpose of this retrospective study was to develop an understanding of how one group of adults who graduated from a Virginia regional alternative program made sense of their experience in an alternative education setting. Specifically, this study sought to determine if adult participants, several years later, perceived participation in the…

American businesses and industries have long identified shortages in key career and technical areas--some of these areas require two- or four-year college degrees, whereas others simply require industry certifications. Career and technical education (CTE) has the potential to play a central role in filling these gaps. The current Carl D. Perkins…