Implemented in 2013, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) requires Local Education Agencies (LEA's) to engage in a continuous improvement process that identifies actions that extend and improve services for targeted student groups. The vision of the LCFF is that all stakeholder groups including Staff (certificated, classified, management and…

School climate has received considerable attention in the literature and educational policy as a potential target for school improvement and school safety efforts. This paper provides a critical review and synthesis of the literature on school climate, with a particular focus on topics related to measurement, data collection, analysis, as well as…

The digital environment has transformed how data on library material use is collected and reported, providing librarians with more information about usage but less clarity about how to interpret it. This article discusses current approaches to reporting and assessing library book use, addresses the question of what qualifies as a worthwhile use of…

Colleges have access to more data than ever before, and to unlock its full potential, the right culture, processes, and technologies are needed. Given the pressures now facing campuses, the demand for evidence-based approaches to strategy have intensified. As a result, more attention has been placed on the importance of the relationship between…

In information gathering interviews, follow-up questions are asked to clarify and extend initial witness accounts. Across two experiments, we examined the efficacy of open-ended questions following an account about a multi-perpetrator event. In Experiment 1, 50 mock-witnesses used the timeline technique or a free recall format to provide an…

Biologists use tree diagrams to illustrate phylogenetic relationships among species. However, both novices and experts are prone to misinterpret this notational form. A difficulty with reasoning with cladograms is that intuitive narrative conceptions of evolution as a linear progression interfere with perceiving the hierarchical relationships that…

Agent-based modeling holds great potential as an analytical tool. Agent-based models (ABMs) are, however, also vulnerable to critique, as they often employ stylized social worlds, with little connection to the actual environment in question. Given these concerns, there has been a recent call to more fully incorporate empirical data into ABMs. This…

School goal setting is often described as a key leadership practice for school improvement. Important for the effectiveness of goal setting is the close monitoring of progress. This article examines goal-monitoring practices in three schools that were seen as being effective and contributing to improvement. The findings highlight the importance of…

Inclusive research with people with learning disabilities often involves audio-recording interviews. However, although barely acknowledged in the literature, participants may not understand that every word recorded will be scrutinised forensically, from which possibly erroneous conclusions may be drawn. This paper describes an alternative method:…

Social science datasets usually have missing cases, and missing values. All such missing data has the potential to bias future research findings. However, many research reports ignore the issue of missing data, only consider some aspects of it, or do not report how it is handled. This paper rehearses the damage caused by missing data. The paper…

A guide for professional counselors and counseling researchers for calculating and interpreting Percent Improvement as an indicator of clinical significance is provided. Strategies for reporting findings are described and illustrated. Guidelines for contextualizing discussions of clinical significance within the boundaries of psychometric evidence…

April is National Minority Health Month in the United States. The first week of April is National Public Health Week. This year, both occasions passed as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded and, in the process, rendered remarkably clear the magnitude of the United States' collective shortcomings in advancing population health equity--particularly as…

The drive in computational methods and more intuitive software has seen a rise in the number of publications in this area in recent years. Computational simulations can be found in many areas of science from computational biology and chemistry to fundamental physics. These may help synthetic chemists in their drug discovery endeavors and…

In recognition of the capability of text-mining models to quantify aspects of language use, some creativity researchers have adopted text-mining models as a mechanism to objectively and efficiently score the Originality of open-ended responses to verbal divergent thinking tasks. With the increasing use of text-mining models in divergent thinking…

Purpose: This paper aims to introduce an information and communication technology (ICT) artifact that uses text mining to support the innovative and standardized assessment of professional competences within the validation of prior learning (VPL). Assessment means comparing identified and documented professional competences against a standard or…