Positive teacher-student relationships are critical for motivation in secondary school yet are conceptualized and measured inconsistently in motivation research. Motivation studies that draw on relational theories typically treat teacher-student relationships as a multidimensional construct, comprising positive (e.g., closeness) and negative…

Fostering the development of Professional Learning communities (PLCs) should be a priority for education because of their capacity to enhance teachers' professional development. However, in everyday educational (school) contexts studying and supporting the growth of PLCs is a complex endeavour. As a consequence, there is a lack of instruments for…

Educational stakeholders are keen to know the magnitude and importance of different interventions. However, the way evidence is communicated to support understanding of the effectiveness of an intervention is controversial. Typically studies in education have used the standardised mean difference as a measure of the impact of interventions. This…

High-quality measures of instructional practice are essential for research and evaluation of innovative instructional policies and programs. However, existing measures have generally proven inadequate because of cost and validity issues. This paper addresses two potential drawbacks of survey self-report measures: variation in teachers'…

Evaluation is a key component to learning about the effectiveness of a program. This article provides descriptive statistics of the newly developed National 4-H Common Measures (science, healthy living, citizenship, and youth development) based on data from 721 California 4-H youth. The measures were evaluated for their reliability and validity of…

In large-scale educational surveys, a latent regression model is used to compensate for the shortage of cognitive information. Conventionally, the covariates in the latent regression model are principal components extracted from background data. This operational method has several important disadvantages, such as the handling of missing data and…

Making the connection between science and technology might be important for students to learn to identify and solve problems and to acquire scientific knowledge and skills. The research reported in this article concerned the development of a design situation in a science classroom and the study of students performing in this situation. More…

The goal of this research is to make sensitivity analysis accessible not only to empirical researchers but also to the various stakeholders for whom educational evaluations are conducted. To do this it derives anchors for the omitted variable (OV)-program participation association intrinsically, using the Love plot to present a wide range of…

This study explored motivation and engagement among North American (the United States and Canada; n = 1,540), U.K. (n = 1,558), Australian (n = 2,283), and Chinese (n = 3,753) secondary school students. Motivation and engagement were assessed via students' responses to the Motivation and Engagement Scale-High School (MES-HS). Confirmatory factor…

Life values, value orientations, social attitudes, and other corresponding social collisions have been the object of many studies. Research on the values of youth in Russia is marred by methodological problems that have not been adequately addressed, and more careful approaches show that there may not be a finite list of values that are held and…

The authors welcome and appreciate the comments of Eric Grodsky and Sigal Alon on their article "Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment." In their comments, Grodsky takes issue with several important theoretical and methodological aspects of their article and Alon highlights key processes…

Buchmann, Condron and Roscigno argue in their article, "Shadow Education, American Style: Test Preparation, the SAT and College Enrollment," that the activities in which students engage to prepare for college entrance exams are forms of shadow education, a means by which more advantaged parents seek to pass their privileged status along…

Fully opened leaves of potted plants of "Oxalis corymbosa" DC. closed completely by folding their leaflets downward after being kept in the dark for two hours. The folded leaflets, then moved upward gradually after exposure to light. We developed a simple method to measure the leaf movement. A paper protractor folded every 10[degrees] was devised…

The National Longitudinal Study (NLS) of the High School Class of 1972 is a large-scale long-term survey effort supported by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), Office of the Assistant Secretary for Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education. NLS is designed to provide statistics on a national sample…

The 7th International Conference on Education Data Mining held on July 4th-7th, 2014, at the Institute of Education, London, UK is the leading international forum for high-quality research that mines large data sets in order to answer educational research questions that shed light on the learning process. These data sets may come from the traces…