This report presents the findings of an analysis of the new or updated Children and Young People's Plan (CYPP) published in 2007. The documents analysed, known variously as plans, reviews or refreshes, are collectively referred to throughout the report as CYPPs. Attendees at the Planning for Excellence (PFE) network workshops suggested that…

Consistent with the California Postsecondary Education Commission's higher education accountability framework, this report summarizes major findings and conclusions from three 2007 Commission reports assessing the contributions of postsecondary education to California's social, civic, and economic well-being. The Commission's research shows that…

Impact evaluations of school-based management (SBM) programs, or any other kind of program, are important because they can demonstrate whether or not the program has accomplished its objectives. Furthermore, these evaluations can identify ways to improve the design of the program. These evaluations can also make successful interventions…

This report presents findings from a review of the best evidence on narrowing the gap in outcomes across the five Every Child Matters (ECM) areas for vulnerable groups in the context of improving outcomes for all. The review was commissioned to prepare the ground for work on "Narrowing the Gap" with participating local authorities (LAs).…

One of the major series of reviews in elementary and secondary education is the Best Evidence Encyclopedia, or the BEE. Up to now, findings for systematic reviews have largely been restricted to the reviews themselves, with few cases in which lessons learned across many reviews using similar methods can be synthesized. The completion of the Best…

Describes the early stages of development of the Campbell Collaboration Social, Psychological, Educational & Criminological Trials Register (C2-SPECTR) to help those preparing and maintaining systematic reviews of experiments in these fields. The register currently contains more than 10,000 records, including more than 300 references to existing…

Discusses four reasons for promoting the use of confidence intervals: (1) ease of interpretation; (2) links with familiar statistical tests; (3) promotion of meta-analytic thinking; and (4) increase of information about precision. Discusses calculations of confidence intervals for a basic standardized effect size measure and discusses software for…

Objective: This study examined the extent to which conclusions of published outcome studies contain phrases that could be misconstrued as implying more empirical support than is warranted. Methods: All articles (N = 138) reporting outcome studies from 2000 to 2005 in two social work research journals and two topical database searches were assessed…

This study examines the existing and potential strategies for sustaining and building greater levels of management and leadership capability in training organisations. The research report is one of the products of a nationally based research consortium: Supporting vocational education and training (VET) providers in building capability for the…

Meta-analysis is a set of procedures used to quantify, integrate, and analyze the findings of a large number of research studies. The article describes the new statistical techniques used and provides an example of their application to data regarding gender differences in throwing velocity of children and adolescents. (Author/MT)

This paper highlights the relative strengths and weaknesses of the contemporary methods of research synthesis and proposes a multistage approach to research synthesis that draws on the strengths of each of these individual methods. In this approach, the decisions at every step of the synthesis process are guided by the nature of the data. The…

The meta-analytic method proposed by S. W. Raudenbush (1988) for studying variance heterogeneity was studied. Results of a Monte Carlo study indicate that the Type I error rate of the test is sensitive to even modestly platykurtic score distributions and to the ratio of study sample size to the number of studies. (SLD)

Problems and illustrations are presented from a meta-analysis of crime reduction programs. Eight criteria are specified for including studies in a meta-analysis, and some problematic studies are discussed using the criteria. Rules for handling problem studies in order to retain consistency throughout the analysis are discussed. (SLD)

An early version of this article, discussing curricular interventions in mathematics, was written for the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC). The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which funds WWC, instructed WWC not to publish it. An expanded version, written at WWC's invitation for a special issue of an independent electronic journal and a book…

This report presents a review of studies and articles on employer-sponsored training in Canada. The authors reviewed documentation that used data from the Workplace and Employee Survey (WES) and offer a synthesis of the current state of knowledge. The report looks alternately at issues pertaining to determinants of training from the employer and…