Teach For America's (TFA) shift over the past decade toward measuring and promoting its teachers' ability to boost student performance has caused the organization to reconfigure not just program directors' roles, but nearly all its other support components. It has overhauled its five-week summer training, known as "Institute," to incorporate the…

This article uses the evaluation of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF) Urban Health Initiative (UHI), a 10-year effort to improve health and safety outcomes in distressed cities, to demonstrate the strength of an evaluation design that integrates theory of change and quasi-experimental approaches, including the use of comparison cities.…

As more nonprofit organizations rely on older adult volunteers to provide services, it is important to retain volunteers for an extended period of time to ensure service quality and the beneficial outcomes of volunteering. Nonprofit organizations are positioned to facilitate older adult volunteers' role performance. Based on an institutional…

Formative assessment provides a means to successfully scaffold learning. Unfortunately, few teachers understand the pedagogical implications of such scaffolding or their role in utilizing formative assessments. The purpose of our study was to develop an understanding of the experience of being a teacher that is seeking to improve learning through…

Duane Webster oversaw the Association of Research Libraries' (ARL) Statistics and Measurement Program as it evolved into the Statistics and Assessment Program. During his 20-year tenure as ARL's executive director, Duane was instrumental in the creation of ARL's Web-based Interactive Statistics and played a leadership role in the development of a…

The homogenous projects-base concept is defined. Next, the necessary steps to create a homogenous projects-base are presented. A metric system is built, which then will be used for analyzing projects. The indicators which are meaningful for analyzing a homogenous projects-base are selected. The given hypothesis is experimentally verified. The…

Gambling has become increasingly popular among minors and is easily accessible to them. This is alarming since research has indicated that minors are more susceptible to gambling pathology than adults. Additionally, gambling has devastating effects on minors that gamble as well as their families and communities. The Illinois Institute for…

Parenting interventions are relevant to many touch points of the child welfare system. This paper describes a multilevel system of parenting interventions called "Triple P" that matches intervention intensities to families, builds on a strong scientific base, provides multiple access points for parents, and offers a destigmatized, cost-efficient…

There is great demand at the federal, state and local levels for hard, cold facts to demonstrate the effectiveness of education programs. In this article, the author discusses ways to utilize data in making the case for career and technical education (CTE). The right information, gathered from internal and external sources, can arm CTE program…

"Singapore Math" is a collection of math curricula originally developed by Singapore's Ministry of Education and private textbook publishers for use in Singapore schools. "Singapore Math" curricula were developed under a national framework centered on problem solving that emphasizes computational skills as well as conceptual…

This article examines a mentoring initiative that embedded advanced students in first-year composition courses to mentor students to excel to the best of their abilities. Mentors attended all classes along with students and conducted many out-of-class individual conferences, documenting each of them using programimplemented work logs. Four hundred…

The current educational model for the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), demands a greater involvement on the behalf of students in all aspects of their education. In this respect, peer mentorship not only provides effective orientation for newly admitted students, a key element of quality in education, but also the active participation of…

Central to the debate regarding the effectiveness of alternative and traditional teacher certification programs is the question of providing high quality teachers for high need schools. The Robert F. Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, funded by the National Science Foundation, supports both alternative and traditional routes to teacher…

Accelerating the acquisition of reading skills in at-risk third- through sixth-grade students is critically important if educators expect to meet federal and state performance targets and also meet children's needs. In an attempt to rapidly advance learning in reading, a large urban school district provided a group of 2,227 students performing…

Internet access has grown in Saudi Arabia between 2000 and 2005 by more than 1000% and many governmental organizations are starting to provide part of their services using the internet. In addition, the Ministry of Higher Education has provided funding to all governmental universities to start developing strategies and guidelines for online…