Background/Context: Community colleges are positioned as a cost-effective way for students to complete the first two years of a bachelor's degree, yet informational barriers to the transfer process are well documented. To transfer, students must overcome informational constraints, navigate bureaucratic hurdles, and resolve conflicting requirements…

The student evaluation of teaching process is generally thought to produce reliable results. The consistency is found within class and instructor averages, while a considerable amount of inconsistency exists with individual student responses. This paper reviews these issues along with a detailed examination of common measures of reliability that…

Population-based outcome monitoring could provide useful information about factors that differentially influence the developmental trajectories of deaf or hard-of-hearing children. A strong basis for population-based outcome monitoring is a coordinated, longitudinal data collection, and management infrastructure that includes quality local…

In this article, I review and discuss the work presented in this special issue while focusing on a number of issues that warrant further investigation in validation research. These issues pertain to the nature of the validation processes, the processes and mechanisms that support validation during comprehension, the factors that influence…

In the past five years, there has been considerable interest in the decision-making process of school board officials in the field of education. However, a paucity of research exists on how these leaders use online resources to inform decision-making. Through an online survey and face-to-face interviews, this study examined the use of online…

This article reports from an empirical study on the affordances and constraints for using staged socio-political debates for authentic summative assessment of scientific literacy. The article focuses on conditions for student participation and what purposes emerge in student interaction in a socio-political debate. As part of the research project,…

Increasing demands for accountability from both the public and the government have resulted in increasing pressure for higher education professionals to use data to support their choices. There is significant speculation that professionals at all levels of education lack the knowledge to implement data-driven decision making. However, empirical…

Quality measurement serves as a foundation for child care Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS). Understanding the variation that exists in quality measurement, the different contexts in which states make decisions, and the factors that play into their decisions can help administrators identify where their state may fall along the spectrum…

With a grant from the Council of the Great City Schools' Senior Urban Education Research Fellowship Program, the authors began a project designed to identify the roots of the dropout problem in the District of Columbia by identifying middle grades students' exhibiting behaviors associated with dropping out of high school. Their plan was to use DC…

In this study, a self-report measure of intervention usage, the Usage Rating Profile for Interventions (URP-I) is developed and empirically examined with regard to factor structure and internal consistency. Results supported that intervention usage is associated with at least 4 different constructs, and that a measure consisting of 25 items may…

As states and communities invest in initiatives to improve the quality of early care and education, the measurement of quality is becoming more widespread and the importance of measuring quality well is gaining increasing attention. Within the broad context of interest in improving quality, this report seeks to differentiate among a number of…

Today's interconnected technical environment creates unprecedented opportunities while simultaneously introducing risks. With economic, social and personal interactions increasingly occurring in technology-mediated settings new vulnerabilities are continually being introduced. This dissertation seeks to improve extant understanding of how…

In empirical research, methods adopted and methods rejected should be stated so that readers and other researchers are convinced of its pedigree and usefulness. (IR)

Institutionalizing the evaluation function within educational institutions serves both accountability and decisionmaking. One of the greatest problems is the reliability of evaluation in formation. Provides guidelines for avoiding credibility gaps that derive from the characteristics of personnel and from the nature of the organizational…