Non-randomized studies may provide valuable evidence on the effects of interventions. They are the main source of evidence on the intended effects of some types of interventions and often provide the only evidence about the effects of interventions on long-term outcomes, rare events or adverse effects. Therefore, systematic reviews on the effects…

A multiple testing method for examining factorial invariance for latent constructs evaluated by multiple indicators in distinct populations is outlined. The procedure is based on the false discovery rate concept and multiple individual restriction tests and resolves general limitations of a popular factorial invariance testing approach. The…

Generally, universities have complex and large websites, which include a collection of many sub-sites related to the different parts of universities (e.g. registration unit, faculties, departments). Managers of academic institutions and educational websites need to know types of usability problems that could be found on their websites. This would…

Whenever you think you have an idea of how something works, you have a mental model. That is, in effect, a layman's way of talking about having an hypothesis. The hypothesis needs to be tested for how closely it fits reality--and reality is the data collected from an experiment. So the data is collected on the few and compared with a few…

We evaluated a discrete-trial functional analysis implemented by regular classroom staff in a classroom setting. The results suggest that the discrete-trial functional analysis identified a social function for each participant and may require fewer staff than standard functional analysis procedures.

Evaluating the effect of a pedagogical innovation is often done by looking for a significant difference in a content measure using a pre-post design. While this approach provides valuable information regarding the presence or absence of an effect, it is limited in providing details about the nature of the effect. A measure of the magnitude of the…

Judea Pearl won the 2010 Rumelhart Prize in computational cognitive science due to his seminal contributions to the development of Bayes nets and causal Bayes nets, frameworks that are central to multiple domains of the computational study of mind. At the heart of the causal Bayes nets formalism is the notion of a counterfactual, a representation…

The purpose of this study is to develop a better understanding of technologies that use natural language as the basis for concept map construction. In particular, this study focuses on the semantic relation (SR) approach to drawing rich and authentic concept maps that reflect students' internal representations of a problem situation. The…

Understanding institutional climate enhances decision-making capacity when planning new programs and improving learning environments on college campuses. This chapter defines climate, discusses the purpose and advantages of climate assessment, and identifies important factors to consider in planning and conducting a personal and social…

How does selective assessment, wherein one counts only the best "k" out of "n" quizzes set, impact grade inflation? Based on our analysis, a specific quantitative answer can be given to a student who plans to skip a quiz, depending, of course, on the student's quiz writing consistency or inconsistency.

Jill Chouinard, in her article "The Case for Participatory Evaluation in an Era of Accountability" (this issue, p. 237), may be re-iterating what has often been claimed and arguably is infused already in much of our theory and practice: the value of participatory approaches in some, perhaps many situations. She summarizes these claims eloquently…

Bayesian estimation for 2 groups provides complete distributions of credible values for the effect size, group means and their difference, standard deviations and their difference, and the normality of the data. The method handles outliers. The decision rule can accept the null value (unlike traditional "t" tests) when certainty in the estimate is…

The selection process for a high school principal rather than the principal evaluation process should be the focus of efforts to improve instructional leadership in high schools.

This dissertation empirically examines the Guerra-Lopez (2007a) Impact Evaluation Process (IEP), which is a prescriptive program evaluation model. Since there is no generally accepted process for arriving at final judgments about the usefulness, appropriateness, effectiveness, reliability, and validity of evaluation models, this study used a…

This study demonstrates the need for the integration of multiculturalism in the K-12 curriculum as well as provides a heuristic based on the work conducted by Sleeter and Grant (2009) to evaluate literature for level of multiculturalism. In the study, the researcher uses an evaluate heuristic to critically analyze and evaluation ten of the books…