The Common Core State Standards for mathematics promote ideals about learning mathematics by providing specific standards focused on conceptual understanding and incorporating practices in which students must participate to develop conceptual understanding. Thus, how we define learning is pivotal because our current definition isn't aligned with…

Engagement is one of the most widely misused and overgeneralized constructs found in the educational, learning, instructional, and psychological sciences. The articles in this special issue represent a wide range of traditions and highlight several key conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and analytical issues related to defining and measuring…

The scientific study of creativity has proven a difficult undertaking. Researchers have employed a diversity of definitions and measurement methods. As a result, creativity research is underrepresented in the literature and the findings of different studies often prove difficult to draw into a coherent body of understanding. A heuristic framework…

Engagement is one of the hottest research topics in the field of educational psychology. Research shows that multifarious benefits occur when students are engaged in their own learning, including increased motivation and achievement. However, there is little agreement on a concrete definition and effective measurement of engagement. This special…

While the evidence for the effectiveness of the use of stories in science teaching and learning is strengthening in current research and literature, the intervention itself, namely, the science story, still suffers from a lack of definition and conception. The purpose of this paper is to determine the amount of narrative relative to non-narrative…

Whether or not a school is dysfunctional depends largely on how dysfunctionality in schools is defined and measured. Dysfunctionality, as any construct, is subject to definition and interpretation, and it is thus always marked by perspectivism. But regardless of the definition games occasionally played by academics, some form of reality takes…

The absence of universally accepted definitions for direct and indirect assessment motivates the purpose of this article: to offer definitions that are literature-based and theoretically driven, meeting K. Lewin's (1945) dictum that, "There is nothing so practical as a good theory" (p. 129). The authors synthesize the literature to…

When planning and evaluating community-level initiatives focused on policy and environment change, it is useful to have estimates of the impact on behavioral outcomes of particular strategies (e.g., building a new walking trail to promote physical activity). We have created a measure of estimated strategy-level impact--"population dose"--based on…

Although curiosity is an undeniably important aspect of children's cognitive development, a universally accepted operational definition of children's curiosity does not exist. Almost all of the research on measuring curiosity has focused on adults, and has used predominately questionnaire-type measures that are not appropriate for young children.…

Good evaluation requires that evaluation efforts themselves be evaluated. Many things can and often do go wrong in evaluation work. Accordingly, it is necessary to check evaluations for problems such as bias, technical error, administrative difficulties, and misuse. Such checks are needed both to improve ongoing evaluation activities and to assess…

In this dissertation, I develop a definition and regional measure of entrepreneurship that will aid entrepreneurship research and economic development policy. My new indicators represent an improvement over current measures of entrepreneurship. The chief contribution of these new indicators is that they incorporate innovation, which others ignore.…