Adult learning policies, like any other policies, need to be effective: they need to reach their objectives and attain the desired impacts, which should be carefully defined. Understanding the performance of policies allows policy makers to change and improve them. A growing body of research and statistics provides important insights into how…

Finance is an important subject in many undergraduate programmes. In the UK, the technical competencies in this area are covered by the QAA benchmark in finance (2007). However, the benchmark does not rigidly circumscribe the curriculum and expected competencies. As a result, universities are free to teach the subject from a variety of…

The authors offer an analysis of current challenges and opportunities regarding the long-standing issue about the quality and status of master's education relevant to training and practice in counseling psychology. Highlighted are historical context, controversies regarding licensure and accreditation (e.g., the 2009 Council for Accreditation…

The key purpose of this study was how we taught the use of benchmark strategy when comparing fraction for fifth-graders in Taiwan. 26 fifth graders from a public elementary in south Taiwan were selected to join this study. Results of this case study showed that students had a much progress on the use of benchmark strategy when comparing fraction…

The purpose of this article is to provide an assessment and analysis of public sector performance contracting as a performance management tool in Kenya. It aims to demonstrate that performance contracting remains a viable and important tool for improving public sector performance as a key element of the on-going public sector transformation…

We describe our experiences teaching MapReduce in a large undergraduate lecture course using public cloud services and the standard Hadoop API. Using the standard API, students directly experienced the quality of industrial big-data tools. Using the cloud, every student could carry out scalability benchmarking assignments on realistic hardware,…

Standard 10 of the Common Core State Standards attends to students' capacity with complex text. This standard distinguishes the Common Core State Standards from previous standards documents. This article describes a process--the Text Complexity Multi-Index (TCMI)--that supports teachers in studying texts to support their students in…

Teacher evaluation has become an increasingly high stakes issue in the field of education as evidenced by its pivotal emphasis in national and local education reform initiatives, funded research, and federal policy levers. In recent years, states have experienced unprecedented pressure to adopt objective performance benchmarks that reflect student…

In the modern world information has become the new power. An increasing amount of efforts are being made to gather data, resources being allocated, time being invested and tools being developed. Data collection is no longer a myth; however, it remains a great challenge to create value out of the enormous data that is being collected. Data modeling…

Criterion-referenced assessments have become more common around the world, with performance standards being set to differentiate different levels of student performance. However, use of standard setting methods developed in the United States may be complicated by factors related to the political and educational contexts within another country. In…

This dissertation proposes a novel analysis of the syntax and semantics of Comparative Correlative sentences in English such as "the bigger they are, the harder they fall or the faster we drive, the sooner we'll get there." The analysis is cast in a framework that distinguishes between argument structure and word order, called…

Accountability systems in education generally include indicators of student performance. However, these indicators often differ considerably among the various systems. More and more countries try to include value-added measures, mainly because they do not want to hold schools accountable for differences in their initial intake of students. This…

School business officials need to "know and show" that their operations are well managed. To do so, they ask themselves questions, such as "How are they doing? How do they compare with others? Are they making progress fast enough? Are they using the best practices?" Using key performance indicators (KPIs) and benchmarking as regular parts of their…

Providing transparent written feedback to doctoral students is essential to the learning process and preparation for the capstone. The purpose of this study was to conduct a qualitative exploration of faculty feedback on benchmark written assignments across multiple, online doctoral programs. The Corpus for this analysis included 236 doctoral…

In this paper, I provide a window into the lived experience of a group of urban high school science students confronted with the stigma associated with special education, disability, and academic failure and present tools to understanding the ideological forces and institutional structures that undermine the ability of schools to create a culture…