Critiquing journal articles can be intimidating, especially for new scholars. Many new graduate students focus on the findings and discussion rather than the quality of the research. This methodology review guide is our tool to help scholars identify and evaluate a research article, particularly focusing on the methodology. Although there are some…

This article discusses the author's belief that if assessment is going to have an impact, it must be woven into the larger tapestry that tells the tale of a student experience that leads to student and institutional success. Included are considerations for how to design meaningful ways to measure movement on the things that people care about.

This article is excerpted from the book "Exemplars of Assessment in Higher Education, Volume Two" (Souza and Rose) and includes an excerpt from Howard University (Phillips). There is a complex relationship between institutional (formerly regional) accrediting bodies and institutions of higher education. Though we believe that accreditors…

Social cognition is a very important group of neurocognitive processes involved especially in social functioning; currently, the amount of research on this topic is increasing and suggests some considerations about its assessment, particularly in the child population. This article presents some of these considerations focussed on the theoretical…

Evaluation competency frameworks across the globe regard evaluation approaches as important to know and use in practice. Prior classifications have been developed to aid in understanding important differences among varying approaches. Nevertheless, there is an opportunity for a new classification of evaluation approaches, in particular one that is…

This research brief describes recent methodological initiatives with the Public Libraries Survey. It describes how starting with the 2022 data, Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) updated geographic identifiers to better align Census Bureau geography types with the library's legal service area, with the goal of enabling data users to…

Recognition of the complexity of the world raises questions about new theories, methods, and capabilities for evaluation practice. Approaches originating in the systems sciences show promise; however, many require specialized expertise and resources. This article explores rich pictures as an accessible, low-resource method for facilitating…

Discussions of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in education that do not show an impact regularly focus on the intervention and how it failed to impact on expected measures, with typologies identifying persistent critical points of failure. This paper uses one such RCT--the Integrating English programme--to exemplify the application of a new…

Walsh University's process of seeking more effective assessment practices has identified an overarching theme of university-wide continuous improvement resulting in several initiatives. The categories of these initiatives can be described as new formats in leadership, unique and collaborative improvements across campus, strategies in alignment…

A significant movement is underway across the nation to design K-12 assessment systems that better equip stakeholders to provide an equitable and excellent education to each child. While some of these innovations emerged before the pandemic, the massive disruption to instruction fueled a new urgency to rethink the potential of assessments to drive…

In this article, the author summarizes and discusses the five "Leadership Imperatives for Assessment Excellence": (1) Making assessment excellence a strategic institutional priority; (2) Attracting and retaining talent to support assessment excellence; (3) Developing sufficient capacity for assessment excellence; (4) Rewarding,…

Postsecondary institutions, and particularly community colleges, are positioned well to train more and more of the nation's entry- and middle-skill workers. The New World of Work (NWoW), a program that promoted teaching and learning soft skills, was designed in 2012 and operated briefly in over 75 community colleges in California. The program…

This paper describes a framework for educating future evaluators and users of evaluation through community-engaged, experiential learning courses and offers practical guidance about how such a class can be structured. This approach is illustrated via a reflective case narrative describing how an introductory, undergraduate class at a mid-size,…

I propose two practical advances to the argument-based approach to validity: developing a living document and incorporating preregistration. First, I present a potential structure for the living document that includes an up-to-date summary of the validity argument. As the validation process may span across multiple studies, the living document…

The template-based automated item-generation (TAIG) approach that involves template creation, item generation, item selection, field-testing, and evaluation has more steps than the traditional item development method. Consequentially, there is more margin for error in this process, and any template errors can be cascaded to the generated items.…