David E. Drew

RANKING ACADEMIC DEPARTMENTS" Empirical Findings and a Theoretical Perspective

Evaluations of academic departments through peer review rankings have assumed importance in decision making by government officials, university administrators, and department chairpersons. This article reviews the history of these highly publicized rankings and subsequent attempts to identify empirical correlates of the ratings. New findings are presented which indicate that the ACE rankings can be predicted almost perfectly (r=.91) with one measure—departmental rate of publication in highly cited journals. The implications of this finding are discussed, since it both supports the notion of peer rankings but also reveals some inherent weaknesses in the academic assessment process. Finally, it is suggested that concepts from social stratification theory can illuminate our understanding of evaluation in higher education.

Understanding the value proposition of health information exchange: the case of uncompensated care cost recovery

This case study examined the use of the Nationwide Health Information Network as a mechanism for secure and interoperable transport of existing clinical data from electronic health records. The context for this study was the secondary use of existing data from MedVirginia, a Virginia Health Information Exchange, for Social Security Administration disability determination. The study found that an estimated U.S.

NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION SIGNALS IN BEHAVIOR-DISORDERED AND NON-DISORDERED LD BOYS AND NLD BOYS

1.9 million in uncompensated care costs were recovered over a 12-month period from August 2009 to July 2010, and serves as an example demonstrating that uncompensated care cost recovery is a promising means by which a health information exchange can provide value to healthcare providers.

America's Wasted Talent: A Karplus Lecture

The purpose of this study was to determine whether learning disabled boys with social/behavioral problems and learning disabled boys without social/behavioral problems differ from each other and from a group of nondisabled boys in the nonverbal signals they emit during social interaction. Thirty-seven, third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade boys were videotaped during an individually administered interview. A subsequent analysis of videotapes for the presence or absence of 31 nonverbal behaviors revealed that only one of the 31 variables differed significantly among the groups. These results suggest that there is little difference in the nonverbal behaviors displayed by the three groups of students under investigation.

Curriculum Reform and Talent Development

Millions of young people who could achieve in mathematics and science are being discouraged or prevented from studying these subjects. Access to jobs, status and power in a high-tech, information economy depends upon mastery of these fields, but erroneous beliefs about aptitude are limiting the options for young women, students of color and students from poverty. Curriculum reform efforts are exciting, much-needed improvements, but the single most important change we need is a national consciousness raising. We should hold high expectations for all students and expect virtually all of them to achieve. Outdated and false notions about which groups possess the aptitude for technical subjects should not be used as barriers to access.

Advanced Ocularmetrics: Graphing Multiple Time Series Residual Data.

In this excerpt from Aptitude Revisited, national curriculum reform efforts in mathematics and science education are reviewed as are the human resources development programs of the National Science Foundation. Institutions that have had extraordinary success in teaching mathematics and science are identified. Model science literacy courses are described as are Saturday academies and other effective intervention programs. A new approach to teaching mathematics and statistics that builds upon the frame of reference the students bring with them is presented.

STEM the Tide

The desirability of randomized experiments (see Gilbert, Light, & Mosteller, 1975) and the usual need for quasi-experimental designs (because real programs rarely can be administered randomly) are staples of the evaluation literature. Campbell (1969) and others long have advocated the need for acquisition and analysis of longitudinal data in such evaluations. Todays graduate students dutifully study trend data from the famous Connecticut crackdown on speeding and the British Breathalyser experiment to learn how graphs can be interpreted to shed light on possible program effects. Inevitably, the data portrayed represent zero-order effects. An outcome is plotted over time, or several graphs portray multipletime series for the treatment and control groups. Techniques for quantifying changes in these graphs at the time of an intervention (e.g., see Box & Tiao, 1968) were developed early in the evolution of quasiexperimental methods. This paper presents a new technique in which covariates are controlled and eval-