Educational researchers and practitioners have paid considerable attention to the use of multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs) in recent years in order to support learning across curricula. Among MUVEs, Second Life (SL) is one of the most popular environments, with over 18 million account-registered users as of May 2008. This paper reports a…

The current study is a formative evaluation of an integrated, school-based program for urban minority youth transitioning into high school. The design of this pilot project was quasi-experimental in nature, with one freshman physical education class assigned to receive the intervention and one to receive no program or "treatment as usual." The…

This report presents results of the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in reading and mathematics at grade 12. Results for students in the nation and, for the first time, in the 11 states that volunteered to participate in the 2009 state pilot program are reported as average scores and as percentages of students performing at…

In the debate over the future of the No Child Left Behind Act, policymakers, educators, and researchers seem to agree on one thing: The federal law's accountability system should be rewritten so it rewards or sanctions schools on the basis of students' academic growth. The U.S. Department of Education recently reaffirmed the Bush administration's…

In this technical report, we describe the development and piloting of a series of mathematics progress monitoring measures intended for use with students in grade 1. These measures, available as part of easyCBM [TM], an online progress monitoring assessment system, were developed in 2008 and administered to approximately 2800 students from schools…

The standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education require that teacher education programs document teacher candidates' effectiveness across different domains. Most challenging for our program is the directive to document the impact that candidates have on preK-12 student learning. To gather information on the effects…

The relationship between substantive arts involvement and social, cognitive, and artistic development is positive. Little is known about arts integrated within special education services to improve academic, cognitive, and social skills. We examined arts-based work and its impact on education of students with disabilities. During Study I, we…

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 requires states to monitor student and school performance based on "adequate yearly progress" (AYP), which essentially is a count of the number of students meeting a specified target. States, many of which have a growing number of schools and school districts entering NCLB's "needs…

Action research can play an important role in institutional research endeavors to improve the quality of organizational performance in higher education. This article outlines how the action research perspective informed a research design that integrated fragmented and isolated student success initiatives at a large urban two-year institution where…

During the 2006 Spring semester, student affairs administrators at West Virginia University called on all student affairs units to develop assessment plans that focused on student learning. Student affairs units were required to begin their assessment plans by selecting at least one learning outcome to measure. The Assessment Council, ten…

This is the fourth report of a process evaluation of Palm Beach County Prime Time, Inc., an intermediary organization dedicated to improving the quality of afterschool programs, by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. It covers the 2007-2008 program year, which was the inaugural year of Prime Time's formal Quality Improvement System (QIS)…

This report summarises key findings from the statistical aspects of the research conducted to assess the impact of the pilot on the attainment of bilingual pupils in participating primary schools. Research was conducted by a team at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) between 2004 and 2006 on behalf of the Department for…

The National Institute of School Leadership's (NISL's) Executive Development Program (EDP) was established to provide professional development to school leaders to drive their schools to high performance. The program emphasizes the role of principals as strategic thinkers, instructional leaders, and creators of a just, fair, and caring culture in…

This report examines a Massachusetts pilot program for quarterly benchmark exams in middle-school mathematics, finding that program schools do not show greater gains in student achievement after a year. But that finding might reflect limited data rather than ineffective benchmark assessments. Benchmark assessments are used in many districts…

Brazil's Sao Paulo Metropolitan Region is conducting a performance evaluation pilot study at three schools serving disadvantaged populations. The objective is first to test methods which can facilitate Post Occupancy Evaluations (POEs) and then to carry out the evaluations. The preliminary results are provided below.