Professional Judgment

Professional judgment is required whenever conditions are uncertain.  This article provides an analysis of professional judgment and describes sources of error in decision making.

This chapter is intended to help solve questions concerning how to judge the appropriateness of assessment or measurement decisions and of the information used to make decisions.

This essay provides examples from reading and math curricula, describes how experts have, for ideological reasons, shunned some solutions that do display robust evidence of efficacy, then examines how public impatience has forced other professions to “grow up” and accept accountability and scientific evidence. 

The past two decades has seen an explosion of research to guide special educators improve the lives for individuals with disabilities. At the same time society is wrestling with the challenges posed by a post-truth age in which the public is having difficulty discerning what to believe and what to consider as untrustworthy. In this environment it becomes ever more important that researchers find ways to increase special educator’s confidence in the available knowledge base of practices that will reliably produce positive outcomes. This paper offers methods to increase confidence through transparency, openness, and reproducibility of the research made available to special educators. To accomplish this the authors propose that researchers in special education adopt emerging open science reforms such as preprints, data and materials sharing, preregistration of studies and analysis plans, and Registered Reports.

This journal attempts to fill the chasm by helping doctors find the information that will ensure they can provide optimum management for their patients. 

Decisions always involve a degree of uncertainty because the outcomes are not known.  This chapter explores the sources of evidence that can inform educational decisions.

This paper draws upon a structured analysis of over 300 research-based papers on mentoring across three discipline areas in an attempt to make more valid inferences about the nature and outcomes of mentoring.

This study examines adoption and implementation of the US Department of Education's new policy, the `Principles of Effectiveness', from a diffusion of innovations theoretical framework. In this report, we evaluate adoption in relation to Principle 3: the requirement to select research-based programs.

Research on data-based decision making has proliferated around the world, fueled by policy recommendations and the diverse data that are now available to educators to inform their practice. Yet, many misconceptions and concerns have been raised by researchers and practitioners. This paper surveys and synthesizes the landscape of the data-based decision-making literature to address the identified misconceptions and then to serve as a stimulus to changes in policy and practice as well as a roadmap for a research agenda.

Implementing evidence-based practices requires not only knowledge of various interventions and practices but also professional judgment in selecting and applying an intervention that best meets the needs of the child and the family.  Previous work on decision-making in evidence-based practices has focused on describing evidence-based practices, how the identification of evidence-based practices has affected the field of education (and, specifically, special education), and strategies for implementing evidence-based practices

In this article we discuss guidelines and algorithms as a means of addressing the complexity of pharmacologic treatment of people with severe mental illnesses and disseminating relevant research findings.

This book reveals how the information revolution is changing the way doctors make decisions. Michael Millenson, a three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee as a health-care reporter for the Chicago Tribune, illustrates serious flaws in contemporary medical practice and shows ways to improve care and save tens of thousands of lives.

This book looks at how new ideas spread via communication channels over time. Such innovations are initially perceived as uncertain and even risky. To overcome this uncertainty, most people seek out others like themselves who have already adopted the new idea. Thus the diffusion process typically takes months or years. But there are exceptions: use of the Internet in the 1990s, for example, may have spread more rapidly than any other innovation in the history of humankind. 

This paper examines the types of research to consider when evaluating programs, how to know what “evidence’ to use, and continuums of evidence (quantity of the evidence, quality of the evidence, and program development).