Given decision-makers often prioritize causal research that identifies the impact of treatments on the people they serve, a key question in education research is, "Does it work?". Today, however, researchers are paying increasing attention to successive questions that are equally important from a practical standpoint--not only does it…

This conceptual paper deals with ways in which gesture or embodied utterances create deictic expressions (i.e., deixis) that are relevant to second language teaching and learning. While many gesture types have been found to be material carriers of meaning (McNeill, 1992; Vygotsky, 1986), deictics have the ability and function to create new…

Fine-grained data on religious communities are often considered sensitive in South Asia and consequently remain inaccessible. Yet without such data, statistical research on communal relations and group-based inequality remains superficial, hampering the development of appropriate policy measures to prevent further social exclusion on the basis of…

Social studies teachers are charged with the task of developing students' understandings as students engage in critical examination of social studies issues and topics. Teachers often use test items from textbooks or instructional resources, or create their own classroom assessments with no specific pedagogical foundation. All too often, these…

Categorizing organisms as living or nonliving things may seem to be intuitive by nature. Yet, it is regulated by scientific criteria. Students come to school with rules already in place. Their categorizing criteria have already been influenced by their personal experiences, also known as observations and inferences. They believe that all things…

Lissitz and Samuelsen (2007) have proposed an operational definition of "validity" that shifts many of the questions traditionally considered under validity to a separate category associated with the utility of test use. Operational definitions support inferences about how well people perform some kind of task or how they respond to some kind of…

Organization is believed to be related to understanding and memory. Whether this belief was applicable in biochemical education was examined about two years after students had experienced biochemistry classes in their first year. The ability of organizing information in biochemistry was judged from the number of correct links of 886 biochemical…

Individually randomized treatments are often administered within a group setting. As a consequence, outcomes for treated individuals may be correlated due to provider effects, common experiences within the group, and/or informal processes of socialization. In contrast, it is often reasonable to regard outcomes for control participants as…

This paper synthesizes two perspectives on essentialism: cognitive and social. The cognitive essentialist perspective argues that our bias to appeal to the psychological belief that categories have innate essences enables us to make inferences about social categories such as race, caste, and gender. The social essentialist perspective argues that…

This paper provides a framework for developing sampling designs in mixed methods research. First, we present sampling schemes that have been associated with quantitative and qualitative research. Second, we discuss sample size considerations and provide sample size recommendations for each of the major research designs for quantitative and…

This paper sits within the research on the affordances of new technologies in the mathematics classroom and focuses on a specific feature that is available in dynamic geometry environments, i.e. measuring tools, within the context of conjecturing and proving in open geometry problems. We develop a classification of different modalities of…

This paper advocates the use of nonparametric statistics. First, the consequence of using parametric inferential techniques under nonnormality is described. Second, the advantages of using nonparametric techniques are presented. The third purpose is to demonstrate empirically how infrequently nonparametric statistics appear in studies, even those…

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures…

This guest editorial describes ways teachers can use guessing games about an unknown item in a "mystery box" to help children improve their abilities to listen to others, recall information, ask purposeful questions, classify items by class, make inferences, synthesize information, and draw conclusions. The author presents information…

Examples are given of how schema and classification skills, presented bilingually, can be used by classroom teachers to teach Spanish-speaking high school students how to infer the main idea of paragraphs in English. The instructional model is one in which the student learns to identify the main idea of a selection in a series of exercises that…