Assessment and Education Research 2 7 The April 2004 CCLI conference focused on building excellence in undergraduate STEM education. The question motivating this chapter (and the workshop on which it is based) was posed by a member of the NSF staff during electronic discussions before the CCLI conference. “... You decided to develop new curriculum materials, or to adapt and implement them in yo...

Evaluating quality improvement interventions requires a variety of methods. These range from quantitative methods, such as randomised controlled trials, to quasi-experimental (controlled before-and-after and interrupted time series) and uncontrolled before-and-after studies, including clinical audits, to determine whether improvement interventions have had an effect. Qualitative methods are oft...

The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) has enjoyed extraordinary bipartisan support stemming from the widespread belief that research studies have proven that WIC "works." Although some studies suggest real dietary and health improvements, the greatest benefits only apply to WIC's prenatal program (just a small part of the total program). Even here, we...

Explanation-based learning (EBL) is a powerful method for category formation. However, EBL systems are only effective if they start with good explanations. The problem of evaluating candidate explanations has received little attention: Current research usually assumes that a single explanation will be available for any situation, and that this explanation will be appropriate. In the real world ...

In a real-world application of supervised learning, we have a training set of examples with labels, and a test set of examples with unknown labels. The whole point is to make predictions for the test examples. However, in research or experimentation we want to measure the performance achieved by a learning algorithm. To do this we use a test set consisting of examples with known labels. We trai...

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Flood phenomenon is one of the catastrophic natural disasters which usually cause injuries and economic losses more than any weather phenomenon. Therefore evaluating flood economic losses is extremely important and it should be consider in socioeconomic development, spatial planning policies and flood control plans. Contrary to importance of this issue, available evaluating methods of flood eco...

the wisdom of crowds, an innovative theory described in social science, claims that the aggregate decisions made by a group will often be better than those of its individual members if the four fundamental criteria of this theory are satisfied. this theory used for in clustering problems. previous researches showed that this theory can significantly increase the stability and performance of lea...