Fostering data-driven decision-making is not an easy task, nor is getting busy people's attention in this age of information overload. How we write about and disseminate our findings can help. Writing to the audience, timing, formatting, choice of medium, and connecting results to institutional goals and current, even controversial, issues are…

Newly updated and revised, this popular text provides a solid introduction to the foundations of research methods, with the goal of enabling students and professionals in the field of applied linguistics to become not just casual consumers of research who passively read bits and pieces of a research article, but "discerning" consumers able to…

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation is an important policy intervention aimed at changing school, district, and state department of education policies and practices to improve student outcomes. These efforts are compromised because NCLB does not prioritize the conditions necessary for improving academic outcomes. One such necessary condition…

When education issues come to be understood in terms that neatly overlay the standard ideological alignments, they often become proxies for the war between Right and Left. This has been the case in the instance of charter schools, with proponents and critics mustering up researchers and findings to buttress their respective claims and, in general,…

Are students learning what they need to know to thrive in the 21st century? Boards can answer that question positively by ensuring that students are engaged in the kind of activities that encourage critical thinking, problem solving, and other important skills. In this article, the author discusses why student engagement matters and describes the…

Purpose: To provide a primer regarding treatment fidelity as it affects evidence-based practice (EBP) for speech-language pathologists. Method: This tutorial defines treatment fidelity, examines the role of treatment fidelity for speech-language pathologists, provides examples of fidelity measurement, and describes approaches for assessing…

"Impact" is a notion that is not very well understood in research. Within Australian higher education, it has been bandied about within such frameworks as the "Research Quality Framework" ("RQF") and Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). Vocational education and training (VET) research is not immune from these…

The best available evidence is one of the three critical features of evidence-based practice. Best available evidence is often considered to be synonymous with extremely high standards for research methodology. However, this notion may limit the scope and impact of evidence based practice to those educational decisions on which high quality…

This article describes a continuing project at the University of South Florida that was first presented in the 83(2) issue of "College and University" (Miller 2007) and further detailed in the 83(3) (Miller and Herreid 2008). Through that point the project had established a predictive formula for determining the risk of attrition of…

Evidence-based practice espouses that all healthcare professionals should provide their clients with the most effective clinical services based on sound research evidence. This philosophy of practice has since permeated to an array of health care and human service disciplines, and the rehabilitation counseling profession is no exception. Although…

Purpose: Evidence-based practice (EBP) describes clinical decision making using research, clinical experience, and client values. For family-centered practices, the client's family is integral to this process. This article proposes that using family paradigms, a family science framework, may help elicit and understand client/family values within…

Policymakers across the nation are leading efforts to ensure that every classroom has an effective teacher. Faced with the need to dramatically improve student outcomes, states have embraced a policy agenda that promotes and supports teacher quality in many ways, including developing evaluation and compensation policies, targeting professional…

The process and importance of Knowledge Translation (KT) for the field of rehabilitation counseling is described. One element of the KT process, systematic reviews of the literature, is described along with several strategies for grading evidence. Practicing clinicians, as do consumers, encounter a number of barriers to using primary source…

Public presentations of research about charter schools have been politicized, polarized, and personalized, fueling cynicism about whether research can generate objective knowledge and promote the collective good. This article draws two distinctions: between politics as a corrupting force and politics as a healthy and necessary component of…

The Australian government has announced its intention to measure the quality of research in Australian universities under the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative. The process for measuring research quality through the ERA is still being developed but the government has proposed that "a suite of indicators appropriate to…