The aim of this case study is to highlight the importance of piloting or pre-testing the research design (in this case, semi-structured interviews and narratives). Most textbooks offer minimal guidance about pre-testing the research design, and published reports rarely report whether the research was piloted and, if so, what were the results.…

Although I am an economic geographer trained in the United States, most of my research has been conducted in Germany or Canada. Thus, I developed my disciplinary schema in a context different from the one where I now use it. This US-focused training taught me that before one examines the local dynamics of a particular industry, labor market, or…

For educational achievement tests that employ multiple-choice (MC) items and aim to reliably classify students into performance categories, it is critical to design MC items that are capable of discriminating student performance according to the stated achievement levels. This is accomplished, in part, by clearly understanding how item design…

Presents an "infobase" version of "A Pilot Standard National Course Classification System for Secondary Education" to allow users to browse, search, annotate, print, and export information electronically. This publication is the culmination of a major effort to help establish common terminology, descriptions, and a coding…