Two-year public colleges educate more than 50% of all U.S. undergraduates, yet graduation rates (29%) fall far below their 4-year counterparts (63%). It is critical for students of 2-year public institutions that their faculty have the appropriate knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) to effectively guide students toward graduation. This study…

School improvement plans (SIPs) have become a central feature of schooling. Educational leaders experience tension between balancing compliance with accountability demands and continuous improvement, and neither of these lenses is centered in the social justice necessary for closing opportunity gaps. We propose a new rubric for assessing the…

The Adult Mentoring Assessment for Extension Professionals will help mentors develop an accurate profile of their mentoring style with adult learners and identify areas of proficiency and deficiency based on six constructs--relationship, information, facilitation, confrontation, modeling, and vision. This article reports on the reliability of this…

Assessing students' emerging literacy skills is crucial for identifying areas where a child may be falling behind and can lead directly to an increased chance of reading success. The Waterford Assessment of Core Skills (WACS), a computerized adaptive test of early literacy for students in prekindergarten through 2nd grade, addresses this need.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to systematically develop and validate an instrument to assess parental perceptions toward adapted physical education (APE) teachers, who work with children with autism. Methods: Participants included two expert panels and parents of children and youth with autism. The survey used a Likert-scale design where…

As cyberschooling options expand, it is vital that we understand the nuances of these particular learning opportunities. Because little research exists on leaders of K-12 cyberschools, this exploratory case study had two purposes. We first examined how 18 cyberschool leaders in the United States obtained their position. Second, we explored the…

As state tests of student achievement are used for an increasingly wide array of high- and low-stakes purposes, evaluating their instructional sensitivity is essential. This article uses data from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Project to examine the instructional sensitivity of 4 states' mathematics and English…

Research has long been clear that teachers matter more to student learning than any other in-school factor. Improving the quality of teaching is critical to student success. Yet only recently have many states and districts begun to take seriously the importance of evaluating teacher performance and providing teachers with the feedback they need to…

The present study examined the psychometric properties and construct validity of scores derived from the Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire (INQ) using latent variable modeling with 5 independent samples varying in age and level of psychopathology. The INQ was derived from the interpersonal theory of suicide and was developed to measure thwarted…

Responding to federal policy and recent research, states and districts have developed and begun implementing multiple-measure teacher evaluation systems. These systems generally include observational and/or student survey measures of instructional quality alongside measures of teachers' contributions to student learning (e.g., value-added models…

Value-added evaluations use student test scores to assess teacher effectiveness. How student achievement is judged can depend on which test is used to measure it. Thus it is reasonable to ask whether a teacher's value-added score depends on which test is used to calculate it. Would it change if a different test was used? Specifically, might a…

This report highlights 10 of the most advanced and talked-about teacher evaluation systems nationally: Delaware; Rhode Island; Tennessee; Hillsborough County, Florida; Houston, Texas; New Haven, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Washington, DC (referred to throughout just as Washington); Achievement First (a charter management organization,…

This final audit report covers the results of the review of five State educational agencies' monitoring plans and awarding processes for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and regular School Improvement Grants funds that the State educational agencies awarded for fiscal year 2009 (for use during school year 2010-2011). The objectives…

This report examines the results of the field test for the base year of the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09). The general purposes of the field test were, in anticipation of the base-year full-scale effort, to test instruments, forms, and procedures; to experiment with different approaches to questionnaire content and survey…

The authors examined the psychometric properties, factor structure, and construct validity of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) in a large offender sample (N = 1,515). Although the DES is widely used with community and clinical samples, minimal work has examined offender samples. Participants were administered self-report and interview…