Strengthening Organizations to Mobilize Californians: Lessons Learned from a Major Initiative to Build the Capacity of Civic Engagement Nonprofits

From 2008 to 2010, twenty-seven community organizing nonprofits in California took part in an unusual and ambitious statewide initiative, Strengthening Organizations to Mobilize Californians (the "Initiative"). Funded by three leading foundations -- The James Irvine Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and David and Lucile Packard Foundation -- the Initiative sought to help nonprofits strengthen their organizations by focusing on such key areas as leadership, decision-making, communication and fundraising.The premise was that stronger organizations could better meet the needs of communities and give their residents more of a voice in civic life. Thus, through the Initiative each foundation sought to support its broader purpose, from improving educational opportunities and access to health care to increasing civic engagement and reforming California's governance system to better reflect the state's diversity.The Initiative specifically explored how different approaches to working with organizations supported change. How did peer exchanges compare with trainings that relied more on expert input? Would convenings enable the kind of networking that organizations need to develop and build momentum for their ideas? How much additional benefit would nonprofits derive from additional coaching time? Findings from the Initiative hold implications for other philanthropic staff members who seek to design, implement and improve capacity building.The insights and lessons presented in this report were distilled through an assessment process that included:A review of data gathered through Event Feedback Forms completed by participants at each activity and event over the course of the InitiativeA post-Initiative survey administered online to all participating organizations, with a response rate of 39 individuals representing 24 out of 27 organizations (89%)Two focus groups attended by 10 executive directors and senior staff from participating organizationsReflective conversations with the foundation partner

The Regulation and Development of Bioremediation

The authors describe how federal statutes regulating hazardous wastes create both incentives and disincentives for exploiting the large potential of bioremediation. Ultimately, they argue for regulation attending more to comparative risks and costs

English Language Learners and Technology: Applying Universal Design for Learning and the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol in the Evaluation of Literacy Support Software

The population of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students in U.S. schools has been steadily increasing. These students do not experience equal educational opportunity in U.S. secondary schools. CLD students need to develop English literacy as well as content knowledge to attain equal educational opportunity. Teachers of CLD students need techniques and tools which support CLD students in mastering the content expected of secondary school students while acquiring English literacy. The criteria for effective lesson design and delivery inherent in the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) and the criteria for designing curriculum without barriers to access inherent in Universal Design for Learning (UDL) are combined into a researcher-created assessment tool, the Literacy Support Software Evaluation Protocol (LSSEP). Nine software applications are evaluated for their effective use with CLD students. The LS SEP is made available for use on other literacy support software

Effect of Summer Learning Loss on Aggregate Estimates of Student Growth

Recent reforms in federal educational policy now mandate the use of student assessment data to evaluate teachers and principals. Despite the widespread adoption of Student Growth Percentiles (SGPs) and other models to link student achievement growth to teacher and school effectiveness, little research exists evaluating the validity of the resulting effectiveness estimates for use in high-stakes personnel evaluation systems. This paucity in the literature is especially problematic given that significant correlations between effectiveness estimates and student characteristics, specifically poverty, have been well documented. This dissertation explores summer learning loss as one potential source of bias in annual estimates of student growth for teacher and school evaluation. The guiding hypothesis is that economically moderated summer learning patterns are contributing to systematic error variance in teacher and school effectiveness estimates when calculated based on annual test scores. Datasets from two, nationally distributed commercial interim assessment programs are analyzed separately and their results discussed. Results reveal that the extent of summer learning loss, and by extension, its effect on the validity SGPs for evaluation purposes varies by subject, grade level, and testing program. Statistically significant correlations between mean Student Growth Percentiles and summer learning loss range from r = -.310 to r = -.662. Implications for fairness and education policy are discussed

Beyond Parameter Estimation: Analysis of the Case-Cohort Design in Cox Models

Cohort studies allow for powerful analysis, but an exposure may be too expensive to measure in the whole cohort. The case-cohort design measures covariates in a random sample (subcohort) of the full cohort, as well as in all cases that emerge, regardless of their initial presence in the subcohort. It is an increasingly popular method, particularly for medical and biological research, due to its efficiency and flexibility. However, the case-cohort design poses a number of challenges for estimation and post-estimation procedures. Cases are over-represented in the dataset, and hence estimation of coefficients in this design requires weighting of observations. This results in a pseudopartial likelihood, and standard post-estimation methods may not be readily transferable to the case-cohort design. This thesis presents theory and simulation studies for application of estimation and post-estimation methods in the case-cohort design. In the majority of extant literature considering methods for the case-cohort design, simulation studies generally consider full cohort sizes, sampling fractions, and case percentages that are dissimilar to those seen in practice. In this thesis the design of the simulation studies aims to provide circumstances which are similar to those encountered when using case-cohort designs in practice. Further, these methods are applied to the InterAct dataset, and practical advice and sample code for STATA is presented. Estimation of Coefficients & Cumulative Baseline Hazard: For estimation of coefficients, Prentice weighting and Barlow weighting are the most commonly used (Sharp et al, 2014). Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW), in this context, refers to methods where the entire case-cohort sample at risk is used in the analysis, as opposed to Prentice and Barlow weighting systems, where cases outside the subcohort sample are only included in risk sets just prior to their time of failure. This thesis assesses bias and precision of Prentice, Barlow and IPW weighting methods in the case-cohort design. Simulation studies show IPW, Prentice and Barlow weighting to have similar low bias. Where case percentage is high, IPW weighting shows an increase in precision over Prentice and Barlow, though this improvement is small. Checks of Model Assumptions: Appropriateness of covariate functional form in the standard Cox model can be assessed graphically by smoothed martingale residuals against various other values, such as time and covariates of interest (Therneau et al, 1990). The over-representation of cases in the case-cohort data, as compared to the full cohort, distorts the properties of such residuals. Methods related to IPW that adapt such plots to the case-cohort design are presented. Detection of non-proportional hazards by use of Schoenfeld residuals, scaled Schoenfeld residuals, and inclusion of time-varying covariates in the model are assessed and compared by simulation studies, finding that where risk set sizes are not overly variable, all three methods are appropriate for use in the case-cohort design, with similar power. Where case-cohort risk set sizes are more variable, methods based on Schoenfeld residuals and scaled Schoenfeld residuals show high Type 1 error rate. Model Comparison & Variable Selection: The methods of Lumley & Scott (2013, 2015) for modification of the Likelihood Ratio test (dLR), AIC (dAIC) and BIC (dBIC) in complex survey sampling are applied to case-cohort data and assessed in simulation studies. In the absence of sparse data, dLR is found to have similar power to robust Wald tests, with Type 1 error rate approximately 5%. In the presence of sparse data, the dLR is superior to robust Wald tests. In the absence of sparse data dBIC shows little difference from the naieve use of the pseudo-log-likelihood in the standard BIC formula (pBIC). In the presence of sparse data dBIC shows reduced power to select the true model, and pBIC is superior. dAIC shows improvement in power to select the true model over naieve methods. Where subcohort size and number of cases is not overly small, loss of power from the full cohort for dAIC, dBIC and pBIC is not substantial.The EPIC-InterAct study received funding from the European Union (Integrated Project LSHM-CT-2006-037197 in the Framework Programme 6 of the European Community). I thank all participants and staff for their contribution to this study. I thank the EPIC-InterAct PI, management team and wider consortium for their permission to use the data, and Nicola Kerrison (MRC Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge) for preparing the dataset which I used in Chapters 2 and 7. I acknowledge personal financial support from the UK Medical Research Council and St John's College, Cambridge

Turning points or turning around: Family coach work with 'troubled families'

The study aimed to discover how family coaches work intensively with families with moderately complex problems bringing together perceptions from 20 families, 20 coaches and six other professionals, and exploring potential savings for 50 family cases. The Family Coaching Service is part of the English government’s ‘Troubled Families’ payment by results initiative, seeking to help families ‘turn their lives around’ to save state spending on anti-social behaviour, worklessness and school absence. Results show the work to be a staged process, over six months with the coach combining practical help with relationship building to engage families, set and achieve goals and negotiate endings. Cost savings were made in 82% of cases. Family coaches find the work rewarding but emotionally demanding. Families say their coach is special and different, and describe potential turning point experiences stemming from the work with their coach. There is clear congruence in the perceptions of the service from families, coaches and other professionals. Some tensions were evident in the work with other professionals and in managing relationship boundaries with families. Relationship-based help offered by para-professionals may offer a promising model of family support that statutory social workers in particular can learn from and engage with

The Impact of van Hiele-based Geometry Instruction on Student Understanding

Developments over the last three decades provide momentum for revising high school geometry instruction as recommended by the van Hieles. Cognitive learning theories, brain research, multiple intelligence theories, revised national and state standards and computer technology-based tools all contribute to the rationale and the means to deliver instruction that enables students to construct knowledge and understanding through a sequential process of exploration, inductive and deductive reasoning. A Regents Geometry unit on quadrilaterals was developed based on these theories and techniques. Forty-three students enrolled in the high school Regents Geometry course received instruction using the newly developed materials. The results of these students showed improvement over the results of the previous year\u27s students under more traditional geometry instruction