The 17th edition of "The State of Preschool," the National Institute for Early Education Research's (NIEER) report on their annual survey of state preschool policies, provides government policymakers valuable information for planning short- and long-term responses to the crisis. The report includes information for every state on child…

The Southeast Comprehensive Center (SECC) at American Institutes for Research (AIR) publishes this biannual update of college- and career-readiness standards and assessment (CCRS-A) resources. This list of resources is designed to assist staff in state education agencies (SEAs) and other educators in their curricula, instruction, standards, and…

Whether an employee is a top performer or at risk of dismissal, clear and consistent feedback plays a key role in his or her professional development. Informal and formal feedback are crucial throughout an employee's tenure. Through the use of formal performance evaluation forms and regular performance discussion meetings, employees and managers…

The process of identifying and selecting peers for a college or university is one of this volume's definitions for "benchmarking": "a strategic and structured approach whereby an organization compares aspects of its processes and/or outcomes to those of another organization or set of organizations to identify opportunities for…

Guided by the missions and visions, higher education institutions utilize benchmarking processes to identify better and more efficient ways to carry out their operations. Aside from the initial planning and organization steps involved in benchmarking, a matching or selection step is crucial for identifying other institutions that have good…

This research investigates a model for developing meta-cognitive tools to be used by pre-service teachers during apprenticeship (student teaching) experience to operationalise the epistemological model of Cook and Brown (2009). Meta-cognitive tools have proven to be effective for increasing performance and retention of undergraduate students.…

There is good reason to look at energy and sustainability as "the" capital investment--savings that can be achieved through energy conservation and other sustainability measures can help offset increasing deferred maintenance and capital renewal costs. The APPA Energy and Sustainability Assessment Tool (ESAT) provides a dynamic database…

This paper traces the development of teacher candidate benchmarks at one liberal arts institution. Begun as a classroom assessment activity over ten years ago, the benchmarks, through collaboration with professional development school partners, now serve as a primary measure of teacher candidates' performance in the final phases of the teacher…

Background: Although there has been considerable research into the reliability of marking for the Key Stage 3 (KS3) National Curriculum tests (NCTs) and public examinations such as the General Certificate of Secondary Education examinations (GCSEs) in England, little is understood about the level of reliability of marking of the Key Stage 2 (KS2)…

Over the past several years, public higher education, both in the U.S. and internationally, has increasingly been required to explain, defend, and validate its performance and value to a wide variety of constituents, including governors, legislators, students, parents, employers, and taxpayers. In addition, in 2006, then U.S. Secretary of…

Are U.S. and, in particular, Hoosier students competitive and ready to succeed in an ever-changing and increasingly global economic landscape? This question is frequently considered by K-12 education stakeholders at all levels, including national, state, and local officials. One of the central ways in which education systems can compare themselves…

This evaluation report provides details for school year 2013 on the percentage of primary students who met or exceeded grade-level reading benchmarks on the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools' (MCPS) Assessment Program in Primary Reading (AP-PR). The percentage remained above 90% for kindergarten students and showed a small decrease for…

This dissertation is a collection of three papers that employ empirical within study comparisons (WSCs) to identify conditions that support causal inference in observational studies. WSC studies empirically estimate the extent to which a given observational study reproduces the result of a randomized clinical trial (RCT) when both share the same…

The goal of this paper is to provide guidance for applied education researchers in using multi-level data to study the effects of interventions implemented at the school level. Two primary approaches are currently employed in observational studies of the effect of school-level interventions. One approach employs intact school matching: matching…

This paper calculates a human Wellbeing Composite Index (WCI) for 42 countries, belonging to the European Economic Space, North Africa and the Middle East, as an alternative to the shortcomings of other well-known measures of socio-economic development (i.e. Gross Domestic Product per head and Human Development Index). To attain this goal,…