Surveys play a prominent role in assessment and institutional research, and the NSSE College Student Report is one of the most popular surveys of enrolled undergraduates. Recent studies have raised questions about the validity of the NSSE survey. Although these studies have themselves been criticized, documenting the validity of an instrument…

Most English-medium programs at European universities require prospective students to take standardised tests for English as a foreign language (EFL) to be admitted. However, there are contexts in which individual teachers' judgements serve the same function, thus having high-stakes consequences for the higher education entrance of their students.…

Internal benchmarking is an established practice in business and industry for identifying best in-house practices and disseminating the knowledge about those practices to other groups in the organization. Internal benchmarking can be done with structures, processes, outcomes, or even individuals. In colleges or universities with multicampuses or a…

Today's learners routinely use technology outside of school to communicate, collaborate, and gather information about the world around them. Classroom learning experiences are relevant when they include communication technologies such as social networking, blogging, and video conferencing, and information technologies such as databases, browsers,…

This paper examines an experienced teacher's employment of the teaching games for understanding (TGfU) model in a UK secondary school. The study sought to investigate how the teacher delivered TGfU and those factors that influenced his informal learning of this instructional model. Occupational socialisation was utilised to determine the factors…

Using computer-based monitoring systems that rely on tests could be the most effective way of knowledge evaluation. The problem of objective knowledge assessment by means of testing takes on a new dimension in the context of new paradigms in education. The analysis of the existing test methods enabled us to conclude that tests with selected…

Purpose, Scope, and Method of Study: The purpose of this study was to compare student success rates in a college developmental writing course delivered in a conventional classroom to the same course using a computer-delivered model. The sample was drawn from a small, Midwestern community college. Students were enrolled in one of three sections…

Since 2011, "Excelencia" in Education and ACT have collaborated to report on the academic readiness of Latino students. This year's report provides a national snapshot of academic performance among Hispanic students in the high school graduating class of 2015 who took the ACT® test. While it benchmarks Hispanic students' college and…

This paper describes the use of existing confidence and performance data to provide feedback by first demonstrating the data's fit to a simple linear model. The paper continues by showing how the model's use as a benchmark provides feedback to allow current or future students to infer either the difficulty or the degree of under or over…

Competition for philanthropic dollars has escalated in recent years, particularly in higher education. A new type of charitable giving--venture philanthropy--has emerged and is impacting both educational policy and practice. Venture philanthropy involves donors using business models, championed practices of venture capitalists, and decision making…

This technical report documents findings from a study of the internal consistency and split-half reliability of the easyCBM© CCSS Reading measures, grades 3-8. Data, drawn from an extant data set gathered in school year 2013-2014, include scores from over 150,000 students' fall and winter benchmark assessments. Findings suggest that the easyCBM©…

This study was an evaluation of the career services component of TRIO Student Support Services at a Midwestern university. The problem in the local setting was the absence of empirical evidence demonstrating compliance of TRIO career services with the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Professional Standards for College and…

Expanded Learning Time (ELT) is seen as one promising approach for improving academic achievement, particularly in the nation's chronically low-performing schools. Since 1995, Citizen Schools (CS) has developed and supported the implementation of its own ELT model. The CS ELT model uses an additional shift of educators and community volunteers to…

The philosophy of "publish or perish" has already been adopted as a yardstick by the vast majority of Chinese higher education institutions in their attempts to benchmark Western research universities in recent years, which has led to increasing pressure on university teachers to produce research publications. This paper addresses this…

Since Merton's classical analysis of cumulative advantage in science, it has been observed that status hierarchies display a sizable disconnect between actors' quality and rank and that they become increasingly asymmetric over time, without, however, turning into winner-take-all structures. In recent years, formal models of status hierarchies…