At first glance it seems easy to attribute cause and effect when it's not applicable, either through mistakenly taking every correlation as a cause and effect relationship, misinterpreting the meaning of independent and dependent variables, or not focusing on direct causes. Sometimes it's easy to help students understand where…

Education reform advocates who base policy decisions on empirical research often face the argument that because background variables explain so much of student outcomes, it follows that policy interventions cannot be effective. This policy brief explains the logical fallacy in the argument, illustrating with two examples, one taken from the…

This "Practitioner's Guide to Growth Models," commissioned by the Technical Issues in Large-Scale Assessment (TILSA) and Accountability Systems & Reporting (ASR), collaboratives of the "Council of Chief State School Officers," describes different ways to calculate student academic growth and to make judgments about the…

Clearly, changing postsecondary finance without a lot of new money to grease the skids will be difficult. The status quo is always easier than change, particularly change that will be objectionable to those who benefited most in the previous system. But political objections aren't the only barrier to changing funding in higher education; a…

Using evidence from eye-tracking studies, Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, and Liversedge (2005) have argued against currently implemented constraint-based models of syntactic ambiguity resolution. The case against these competition models is based on a mismatch between reported patterns of reading data and the putative predictions of the models.…

This paper offers a critical examination of common misconceptions concerning college students with learning disabilities (LD), including, among others: LD college students are older versions of high school LD students, college entrance data can accurately predict LD student success, and LD students disclose their handicaps to institutions of…