Across all social science disciplines, but in particular public administration, there is a shared concern about the costs of using traditional random samples to generate data, and its impact on researchers' ability to engage in "quality" research. As a result of these costs, more academics, practitioners, and students are turning to…

The Forum Guide to Early Warning Systems provides information and best practices to help education agencies plan, develop, implement, and use an early warning system in their agency to inform interventions that improve student outcomes. The document includes a review of early warning systems and their use in education agencies and explains the…

We all think of a marathon as a long-distance running event with an official distance of 42.195 kilometers (26 miles and 385 yards). Throughout time marathon runners have pursued their longest goals by allowing their body to adapt to the new stresses through training. Training for a marathon takes intense preparation, dedication and skill. It is…

Survey sampling is fundamentally an applied field. The goal in this book is to put an array of tools at the fingertips of practitioners by explaining approaches long used by survey statisticians, illustrating how existing software can be used to solve survey problems, and developing some specialized software where needed. This book serves at least…

As the demand for college graduates increases, it is critical (from both supply and demand perspectives) that students choose the postsecondary option that best meets their needs. Improved college readiness is an important first step to better informed choices about college. Parents and students need access to easy-to-understand data to make the…

Embarking in an educational research paper is one of the daunting processes any scholar can go through. And the process is even harder for novice education students who wander through the plethora of terminology, styles and paradigms trying to figure out their way in that jungle called educational research. The following of the review presents the…

Walking readers step by step through complex concepts, this book translates missing data techniques into something that applied researchers and graduate students can understand and utilize in their own research. Enders explains the rationale and procedural details for maximum likelihood estimation, Bayesian estimation, multiple imputation, and…

This report presents findings on the numbers and types of public elementary and secondary local education agencies (LEAs) in the United States and other jurisdictions in the 2007-08 school year, using data from the Local Education Agency Universe Survey of the Common Core of Data (CCD) survey system. The CCD is an annual collection of data that…

Challenging behaviors and poor student performance are often attributed to many of society's ills. As a result of the presence of such factors in some students' lives, changing these students' behavior in the classroom is seen as futile unless one can change their nonschool environment. To facilitate the reader's capability to develop intervention…

The aim of this paper is to show how the noise reduction by signal accumulation can be accomplished with a data acquisition system. This topic can be used for student projects. In many cases, the noise reduction is an unavoidable part of experimentation. Several techniques are known for this purpose, and among them the signal accumulation is the…

Scientists call the land along the edges of a river, stream, or lake a riparian zone. In this guide, riparian zone will be called the Green Zone. Riparian zones make up only a small part of land in the United States. But they are very important. They protect water quality and quantity, supply food and shelter for fish and wildlife, and provide…

This compendium is a guide to the major national data resources related to higher education in the United States. Designed to support quality educational research and policy analysis, the Compendium describes 100 resources, including general references as well as resources pertaining to students and learning, faculty and staff, finance and…

This article draws attention to local and global attendance monitoring in higher education. The paper outlines benefits of attendance monitoring for both the individual learner and university, and compares traditional paper-based attendance monitoring systems with an electronic system piloted in the Business School and School of Technology at the…