Krazy Kat's iconic phrase "Lenguage is that we may mis-unda-stend each udda" (=language is that we may misunderstand each other) to Ignatz has been used and reproduced repeatedly to highlight George Herriman's comics around language and its functions. Such a phrase hides great truths when the interlocutors do not understand words with…

Distances derived from word embeddings can measure a range of gradational relations--similarity, hierarchy, entailment, and stereotype--and can be used at the document- and author-level in ways that overcome some of the limitations of weighted dictionary methods. We provide a comprehensive introduction to using word embeddings for relation…

This article reviews the origins and use of the terms quasi-experiment and natural experiment. It demonstrates how the terms conflate whether variation in the independent variable of interest falls short of random with whether researchers find, rather than intervene to create, that variation. Using the lens of assignment--the process driving…

This thought piece is written by four dyslexic disability scholars who reject dyslexia as an explanatory account. Instead, we adopt Lexism -- the othering of dyslexics by normative practices and assumptions of literacy. In asserting a political position and our self-identity, we explore our personal ambivalent experiences of diagnosis. The new…

We introduce a new metric--the classification power--to examine the effectiveness of postsecondary mathematics placement policies. This metric addresses the methodological challenges of contextualizing the effectiveness of a single placement policy and comparing the effectiveness of multiple placement policies across different student populations.…

Reform is often associated with anticipated changes aimed at altering and improving social structures. Revealing the outcomes of reform initiatives, as well as identifying key facilitators and circumstances that contributed to their success or failure, can provide a deeper understanding of this distinct social phenomenon. Social transformations…

In China, formal school groupings known as 'education collectives' have become one of the most common forms of school-to-school collaboration, promoted by policymakers to narrow the achievement gap between schools and optimise resource allocation. Previous research has focused on the purposes and achievements of education collectives rather than…

Some previous researchers attempted to bridge the gap between two bodies of research: the role of metacognitive knowledge in second language (L2) writing and L2 collaborative writing (CW). Although recent studies unveiled the positive impacts of learners' metacognitive knowledge on L2 collaborative writing, there is not yet consensus regarding the…

In the 1960s, people across the West started imagining that they were in a societal transition. Crucially, in these future-oriented discussions, social class was often transformed into educational attainment as the main dividing line. These future studies garnered attention across the political spectrum, including the Swedish Conservative Party.…

"A Dictionary of Contemporary Figurative Language" is meant to be an appendix to an earlier, more comprehensive work: ED648945, "A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor 2024." This appendix simply updates the dictionary of that previous work to better reflect the language used during the 2024…