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The purpose of this paper is to examine academic performance measures commonly used in personnel selection contexts and associated gender‐based differences in these measures. This work specifically examines the extent to which gender‐based group differences exist in these data that may influence employment outcomes differentially for men and women.

Drawing on data available from academic institutions with a sample of nearly 4,000 prospective applicants, gender‐based group differences were evaluated in academic performance measures commonly used in personnel selection. Group differences were evaluated with a commonly used metric of a d‐value to reflect the magnitude of these differences.

Women and men yield differential scores on standardized vs non‐standardized assessments. Women consistently scored lower on standardized assessments yet scored highest on academic performance outcomes. Women are more likely to experience adverse impact when standardized assessments are used in selection decisions; however men are more likely to have adverse impact when academic performance is used.

Organizations may inadvertently create entry barriers depending on the assessment and the format used and whether or not group differences exist in measures.

Academic performance measures are frequently used in personnel selection, yet have received little attention in selection research and this study seeks to address this gap.

This study aims to explore which outcome measures are used by occupational therapy staff in adult social care settings in the UK, and the factors affecting use of outcome measures.

A quantitative descriptive research design was used, using a cross-sectional study to explore occupational therapy staff views on the use of outcome measures. A 38-question survey was developed on Microsoft Forms. Recruitment occurred online over a three-week period in 2021 via the social media platform “Twitter”. Results were analysed using Excel using descriptive statistics and qualitative results used thematic analysis.

Participants (n = 20) used a range of outcome measures (13) in adult social care settings in the previous 12 months. Standardised measures were used by half the sample in the previous 12 months. The Therapy Outcome Measure and Barthel Index were in most use. The breadth of adult social care practice and practical factors such as caseload and lack of a meaningful tool were found to be barriers to outcome measure use. Facilitators included service improvement, accountability, use of audit and professional occupational therapy leadership.

The overall use of outcome measures can be considered low in this setting, with manager support seen to be key to the use of outcome measures. Further research is needed to investigate nationwide use.

Training, time and manager support are key to use of standardised tests and outcome measures in the adult social care settings. The use of occupational performance measures should be considered to demonstrate unique professional impact.

This contemporary study reveals use of outcome measures within occupational therapy adult social care services in the UK, which is an under researched and under published area.

The author describes the continuous development of federal education policy from the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act through the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top state competition, noting critical similarities and results. Scholars of education and society agree that socioeconomic status of a school’s population is the most reliable indicator of a school’s success. Ravitch (2013) has emphasized the correlation of both racial isolation and poverty of communities with the standardized test scores of the communities’ students.

The author explores the main components of the Race to the Top competition, including its emphasis on measuring both student and teacher success at least partially in the form of standardized test scores, alongside the similarly standardized test-centric No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Through a critical comparison of the two administrations’ policies, the author demonstrates that federal education policy since 2001 has supported an increasingly powerful “educational reform” movement whose actions have been harmful to American public schools. Existing research in education overwhelmingly rejects the actions represented by federal education policy.

Both major American political parties have enthusiastically embraced an increasingly powerful “educational reform” movement whose actions have been harmful to American public schools. Teachers, scholars of education, students, parents, and other stakeholders must continue to demonstrate in the public sphere their dissatisfaction with standardized test-centric policies; school closings euphemistically titled “turnarounds”; and other hallmarks of the “educational reformers.”

The primacy of teacher effects on student achievement has been well documented from a variety of methodological approaches within the field of education research. Governments across the globe have or will address educational equity, especially the education of the poor, by designing programs to attract, train, develop, retain, and study more effective teachers. In their Concept Note, the World Bank also raises “fundamental questions” that balance upon an understanding of the development and measurement of teacher effectiveness. These include question 1: “What are the most important challenges in the next decade for building knowledge and skills for life and work in different country contexts?” and question 3: “What educational results should the Bank be accountable for in the next ten years, and how would we measure these achievements?” In this chapter, we build upon the extensive research that suggests teacher effectiveness ought to be the primary goal of educational reform efforts across the globe. We highlight the complexity of measuring effectiveness, especially across countries and varied contexts for education. We argue that the ways in which effectiveness is measured will have a direct impact on the potential of any reform policy to positively influence the overall effectiveness of a teaching force and the achievement of its students.

The present study seeks to refine the findings and theory on the impact that enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations have had on management accounting. Specifically, the purposes of this paper are to analyze the changes that ERP implementations have had on performance measures, management accounting techniques, activities of management accountants, and the use of non‐financial information.

The controllers of 13 major Canadian firms were interviewed as part of a multiple case study. Open‐ended questions were used.

The research assesses how ERP implementations through more computational power, relational databases, standardized state‐of‐the‐art transaction processing, and extended chart of accounts change management accounting. The enhanced computing power and overall standardization lead to more accurate and timely information. The standardized transaction processing and the charts of accounts have increased the availability of information from units and products previously deficient of information, and ensured a consistency of information across all units and products. The standardization and automation of transaction processing has reduced the amount of data entry done by management accountants. Performance measures have been standardized, expanded to more units and products, increased in accuracy, and produced more quickly. Management accounting techniques have become more efficient and effective. Management accountants are less involved with data entry, thus allowing them to undertake more analyses. Non‐financial information is more extensive.

This research provides new insights or contributions to understanding how ERP systems impact management accounting and management accountants. First, ERP system implementations affect management accounting. Second, the three part lens or conceptual framework – physical, transactional, and information – explicates the impact of ERP systems on management accounting and management accountants. Third, understanding the impact is further guided by recognizing the expanded chart of accounts inherent with ERP systems.

There are often calls for more focus on outcomes in Children’s Social Care yet there is little consensus on what these outcomes should be. Key challenges include who should decide what outcomes should be measured and the sheer range of issues that social workers deal with. The purpose of this paper is to provide a reflective account of approaches to measuring outcomes that the author has used in recent studies in order to illustrate the complexity involved in understanding what the purpose of Children’s Social Care is and therefore how outcomes might be measured.

A review of and reflection on lessons from recent research studies carried out by the author and colleagues.

The results are used to illustrate and support an argument that Children’s Social Care performs multiple functions and that this has implications for thinking about outcomes. Helping children and parents is one element of the work, but assessing risk across large numbers of referrals and identifying those that require involvement is equally important. Furthermore, the social work role requires complex considerations around liberty and the rights of parents and children. One consequence of this is that the quality of the service provided is important in its own right.

It is suggested that the evaluation of Children’s Social Care involves four types of outcomes: measures of the quality of the service provided; assessment of whether the “right” families are being worked with; client-defined measures of change; and the development of appropriate standardised instruments. Examples of approaches in each area are discussed.

The theoretical considerations suggest that we need to have a multi-dimensional approach to evaluating, inspecting and leading Children’s Social Care services. In particular, the importance of the quality of delivery and appropriate targeting of the service are emphasised, as well as considering various approaches to measuring outcomes.

The paper proposes a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures of process, assessment and outcomes for evaluating outcomes in Children’s Social Care.

Reports the analysis of the data normally used to admit graduate students into US graduate programmes for preparing educators for leadership positions in schools. Further analyses the data of additional criteria used by one university in an attempt to provide more equitable evaluation of minority students. The results show significant differences in the scores of black and Hispanic females and other subgroups on standardized tests, but not on jobrelated measures. Recommendations include broadening the measures used to make decisions regarding candidates′ admittance to assure a more equitable pool of candidates to fulfil the needs of the rapidly changing demographics in the schools.

With the national emphasis on the use of evidence-based practices in educational settings, intervention research within the field of special education is being scrutinized. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has defined evidence-based practices primarily by research that is based on quantitative, experimental designs (i.e., RCT). Although the use of appropriate experimental designs has an important place in educational research, defining evidence-based practices based on research design alone is limiting. One critical aspect of research that has not received much attention is the importance of rigorous and precise measurement and systematic replication of research findings. The purpose of this chapter is to review issues surrounding measurement and its effect on validity in intervention research in the field of behavioral disorders. Specifically, we discuss how more rigorous measurement can positively influence the internal, external, construct, and social validity of research findings. A review of current trends in behavioral disorders intervention research is discussed as well as implications for future research.

Health and social care services should demonstrate the quality of their interventions for commissioners, patients and carers, plus it is a requirement for occupational therapists to measure and record outcomes. Use of the “Therapy Outcome Measure” (TOMs) standardised tool was implemented by an occupational therapy adult social care service to demonstrate outcomes from April 2020, following integration to a community NHS Trust.

The aim was to demonstrate occupational therapy outcomes in adult social care through a local audit of the TOMs. The objective was to determine if clients improved following occupational therapy intervention in the four domains of impairment, activity, participation and wellbeing/carer wellbeing. 70 cases were purposively sampled over a 2-month timeframe, extracting data from the local electronic recording system.

Occupational therapy in adult social care clearly makes an impact with their client group and carers. Evidence from the dataset demonstrates clinically significant change, as 93% of clients seen by adult social care occupational therapy staff showed an improvement in at least one TOMs domain during their whole episode of care. 79% of activity scores, 20% of participation scores and 50% of wellbeing scores improved following intervention. 79% of carer wellbeing scores improved following occupational therapy.

The audit did not collect data on uptake from the separate teams (equipment, housing, STAR and adult social care work) in occupational therapy adult social care. Potential sampling bias occurred as cases with completed scores only were purposively sampled. Sampling was not random which prevented data gathering on uptake of TOMs across the separate teams. Additionally, the audit results can only be applied to the setting from which the data was collected, so has limited external validity.

These novel findings illustrate the valuable and unique impact of occupational therapy in this adult social care setting. The integration of adult social care into an NHS Community Trust has supported the service to measure outcomes, by utilising the same standardised tool in use by allied health professions across the Trust.

The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of designing league regulatory mechanisms given the multi-dimensionality of competitive balance and the proliferation of empirical measures.

A three-stage approach is adopted. Firstly, a taxonomy of empirical measures of competitive balance is proposed, identifying two fundamental dimensions – win dispersion and performance persistence. Secondly, a simple two-team model of league competitive balance is used to explore the dispersion–persistence relationship. Third, correlation and regression analysis of seven empirical measures of competitive balance for the 18 best-attended top-tier domestic football leagues in Europe over the 10 seasons, 2008–2017, are used to (1) validate the proposed categorisation of empirical measures into two dimensions; and (2) investigate the nature of the dispersion–persistence relationship across leagues.

The simple model of league competitive balance implies a strong positive dispersion–persistence relationship when persistence effects increase for big-market teams relative to those for the small-market teams. However, the empirical evidence indicates that while leagues such as the Spanish La Liga exhibit a strong positive dispersion–persistence relationship, other leagues show little or no relationship, and some leagues, particularly, the English Premier League and top-tier divisions in Belgium and Netherlands, have a strong negative dispersion–persistence relationship. The key policy implication for leagues is the importance of understanding the direction and impact of dispersion and persistence effects on the demand for league products.

The variability in the strength and direction of the dispersion–persistence relationship across leagues is an important result that undermines the “one-size-fits-all” approach to designing league regulatory mechanisms.