The relationship between public education expenditures and student outcomes remains an important concern for policy analysts, educational administrators, and the public at large. While previous studies have failed to identify a consistent relationship between public investments in education and positive student outcomes, most analyses have not…

The Pittsburgh Promise is a scholarship program that provides $5,000 per year toward college tuition for public high school graduates in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania who earned a 2.5 GPA and a 90% attendance record. This study used a difference-in-difference design to assess whether the introduction of the Promise scholarship program directly…

As charter school waitlists around the United States continue to grow, it is important to analyze the factors that are possibly attracting parents away from the traditional public school setting and into the charter school system. Using waitlist data from Pennsylvania to proxy for parental valuation, the article examines numerous factors that…

Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,312) were analyzed to examine whether the adverse effects of early insensitive parenting on children's academic functioning can be offset by parents' later involvement in children's education. Observations of mothers' early…

Recent police shootings in which multiple officers fired numerous rounds at suspects have led some observers to assert that such situations involve "contagious fire," where an initial officer's shots launch a cascade of gunfire from other officers present. Although there is anecdotal recognition of the contagious fire phenomenon among…

Recent studies have produced conflicting findings about the impacts of local nonresidential land uses on perceived incivilities. This study advances work in this area by developing a land-use perspective theoretically grounded in Brantingham and Brantingham's geometry of crime model in environmental criminology. That focus directs attention to…

Researchers randomly selected Pennsylvania public middle level schools to identify significant relationships between principals' instructional leadership behaviors and student achievement, with school socioeconomic status (SES) as a secondary variable of interest. For each participant school, four teachers and the principal were asked to complete…

There is a need for improved techniques for selection of students and prediction of student success in vocational-technical education. This study concerns identification of the kinds of readily available data which may be used to predict student success in Pennsylvania area vocational-technical schools and to differentiate among the…

The Second International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM2009) was held at the University of Cordoba, Spain, on July 1-3, 2009. EDM brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large data sets to answer educational research questions. The increase in instrumented…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…