This Annual Plan presents the major initiatives and priorities the U.S. Department of Education (Department) Office of Inspector General (OIG) intends to undertake to assist the Department in fulfilling its responsibilities to America's taxpayers and students. The Department continues to face a significant number of challenges in FY 2013 that…

Over a three-year period educators at an urban elementary school were interviewed about a Response to Intervention model from development to implementation supported by professional development within a university-school partnership. While the model was initially viewed as an administrative directive, in Year 2 educators began to assume…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to describe one Connecticut middle school's voluntary implementation of a data-driven decision making process in order to improve student academic performance. Data-driven decision making is a component of Connecticut's accountability system to assist schools in meeting the requirements of the No…

This article examines how laptop computing technology, teacher professional development, and systematic support resulted in changed teaching practices and increased student achievement in 47 K-12 schools in 11 Florida school districts. The overview of a large-scale study documents the type and magnitude of change in student-centered teaching,…

This paper summarizes an effort to transpose and sustain the evidence-based Early Risers "Skills for Success" conduct problems prevention program in a real world community service system. The Early Risers program had previously been implemented by a local agency within the context of research-based operations. In the current initiative,…

Education researchers are being asked to conduct rigorous, scientifically based studies of K-12 curriculum interventions; therefore, the need for measuring fidelity of implementation and empirically relating it to outcomes (the chief rationale for this review) is warranted to ensure internal and external validity. The results of this review…

Copious educational technology projects have been implemented in several low-income communities by multilateral institutions, individuals, and governmental agencies. Statistics show that the majority of these initiatives fail to accomplish their objectives, thereby wasting colossal amounts of money, talent, and resources. Scholars aver that poor…

Zili Sloboda, Sc.D., and colleagues at the University of Akron, Ohio, designed and evaluated "Take Charge of Your Life", a substance abuse prevention curriculum for 7th- and 9th-grade students delivered by D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) police officers. They designed "Take Charge of Your Life" to impact students'…

The collection of articles in this special issue on relational aggression gives a glimpse into the complex social networks, first, of children's relational aggression and, second, of the collaborators who develop and validate children's prevention programs. The programs described in this special section are among the first to address relational…

The focus of this study is the development and implementation of the Iterative Needs Assessment/Evaluation Model for use as part of an English curriculum reform project at a four-year university in Japan. Three questions were addressed in this study: (a) what model components were necessary for use in a Japanese university setting; (b) what survey…

The National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was contracted to undertake a three-year external evaluation of the Artful Learning program, an arts-based school improvement model developed from the work and philosophy of the late composer Leonard Bernstein.…

This article discusses the development, implementation, and effects of a middle school empathy building program that was designed to reduce bullying behavior. Results show that participants in the intervention group reported engaging in significantly less bullying behavior as compared to the control group, and the program was particularly…

The effectiveness of a behavioral skills training package that consisted of modeling, rehearsal, and feedback was evaluated to increase correct implementation of guided compliance by caregivers of 3 children who exhibited noncompliance. Results showed that the training package improved performance of guided compliance. Generalization probes…

There is an untapped potential of social work faculty to conduct aging research aimed at enhancing the well-being of older adults. To better exploit this resource, we have designed, implemented, and evaluated a postgraduate training program in aging research. The goal of the program is to build and sustain a community of social work faculty…

Having implemented and evaluated over 35 mlearning projects in a variety of contexts in higher education over the past 6 years the researcher is ready to share the untold secret: not all mlearning projects succeed! This article critiques three of the researcher's mlearning projects that can be classed as "failures" and compares them to successful…