The names of the participants and the school district used in this program evaluation are pseudonyms to protect the participant's identity. This program evaluation was from the perceptions of the parent/guardian and faculty of the Garnett County School District (GCSD) K-8 Alternative Learning Program. The study focused on the middle school…

Despite policy efforts to encourage multiple measures of performance in newly developing teacher evaluation systems, practical constraints often result in evaluations based predominantly on formal classroom observations. Yet there is limited knowledge of how these observational measures relate to student achievement. This article leverages the…

This brief summarizes a 2019 study of educator supply, demand, and quality in North Carolina conducted by the Learning Policy Institute in collaboration with the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina and WestEd. That study supported the state's ongoing efforts to meet the standard set in the North Carolina Supreme Court's decision in…

Inquiry-based science interventions aim to improve students' science proficiency by helping them understand scientific processes. In these interventions, students conduct hands-on investigations of science concepts and everyday phenomena, construct explanations for what they observe, consider alternative explanations, and communicate and justify…

Performance-based accountability along with budget tightening has increased pressure on publicly funded organizations to develop and deliver programs that produce meaningful social benefits. As a result, there is increasing need to undertake formative evaluations that estimate preliminary program outcomes and identify promising program components…

The Schools to Watch: School Transformation Network Project is a whole school reform model designed to improve the educational practices, experiences, and outcomes of low-performing middle-grades schools. Developed by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle-Grades Reform, the four-year project was funded in 2010 by a U.S. Department of Education…

Many public school districts struggle with the federal and state charge to increase student achievement while continuing to build the instructional capacity of classroom teachers. While this charge may not seem to be unreasonable, the widening achievement gap between various student subgroups as evidenced in standardized testing results presents…

Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™) is committed to providing partners with useful tools to help make inferences from the Measures of Academic Progress® (MAP®) interim assessment scores. Recently, NWEA completed a concordance study to connect the scales of the North Carolina End-of-Grade (EOG) English language arts (ELA) and math with those…

Science Without Borders is a unique interdisciplinary science course that uses group and active-learning strategies and is in high demand among nonscience majors at a masters-level university. Registrar data showed that nonscience majors were far more likely to choose this course compared with other, discipline-based science courses. In an…

Background: Although males are often the initiators of teen sexual activity, pregnancy prevention programs generally target females. To address this deficiency, the Wise Guys Male Responsibility Curriculum was developed to be delivered to adolescent males in weekly classroom sessions. Methods: Seventh grade participants (n = 124) in the Wise Guys…

The study reviewed in this paper examined the effect of school choice on the criminal activity, academic achievement, and high school graduation rate of more than 2,000 male middle and high school students in North Carolina's Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. For the 2002-03 school year, all district students were given the choice to either…

This study compared the creative outcomes in student work resulting from two pedagogical approaches to creative problem solving activities. A secondary goal was to validate the Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) as a means of assessing creativity. Linear models for problem solving and design processes serve as the current paradigm in classroom…

This study determined whether there was a significant relationship between teacher effect data in middle school mathematics and a teachers years of experience and whether there was a significant relationship between an effective teacher as measured by the total score on the Haberman instrument and teacher effect scores as measured by SAS EVAAS,…

This year the Center on Education Policy (CEP) analyzed data on the achievement of different groups of students in two distinct ways. First, it looked at grade 4 test results to determine whether the performance of various groups improved at three achievement levels--basic and above, proficient and above, and advanced. Second, it looked at gaps…

Guided by a new framework, the NAEP science assessment was updated in 2009 to keep the content current with key developments in science, curriculum standards, assessments, and research. The 2009 framework organizes science content into three broad content areas. Physical science includes concepts related to properties and changes of matter, forms…