Criteria are briefly proposed for final conclusions, research problems, and research hypotheses in quantitative research. Moreover, based on a proposed definition of applied and basic/general research, it is argued that (1) in applied quantitative research, while research problems are necessary, research hypotheses are unjustified, and that (2) in…

Educational research enquiries differ based on philosophical beliefs and assumptions regarding researchers' explicitly stated views. This paper critically explores the most dominant philosophical stances in social research sciences, namely positivism, interpretivism and pragmatism. It begins with an overview of the role of the aforementioned…

A vast body of work highlights executive functions (EFs) as robust correlates of mathematics achievement over the primary and preschool years. Yet, despite such correlational evidence, there is limited evidence that EF interventions yield improvements in early years mathematics. As intervention studies are a powerful tool to move beyond…

The main purpose of this study was to determine significant positive effects among the use of three different types of drafting models, and to identify whether any differences exist towards promotion of spatial visualization ability for students in Industrial Technology and Technology Education courses. In particular, the study compared the use of…

Due to the nature of collaborative learning, realising perfectly controlled experiments often requires an unreasonable amount of resources and sometimes it is not possible at all. Against this background, I propose to augment as good as feasible experimental design with a nomological net of relations between instructional support (intervention),…

This case study reports on the process for creating a self-paced non-credit information literacy (IL) course delivered via a university's course management system. The four online modules are designed to contextualize information literacy competencies within the curriculum taught in First Year Seminar (FYS) courses. The meta-course approach…

The tools used in learning processes are in a continuous state of flux. One of the most significant changes is the application of Information and Communications technologies (ICTs) to educational contexts. This provides new possible ways to carry out learning activities, new learning services, the possibility to use new kinds of contents and…

This study examined the extent to which school outdoor activities could enhance senior secondary (SS) two students' achievement in ecology. Non randomized pre test post test control group Quasi-experimental design was adopted. A sample of 160 SS II students from 4 co-educational schools in Jalingo metropolis, Taraba State Nigeria was used. A 40…

Background/Context: Principles of evidential reasoning have often been discussed in the context of educational and psychological measurement with respect to construct validity and validity arguments. More recently, Mislevy proposed the metaphor of assessment as an evidentiary argument about students' learning and abilities given their…

The motivation for this paper is the authors' recent work on several randomized control trials in which they found the primary result, which averaged across subgroups or sites, to be moderated by demographic or site characteristics. They are led to examine a distinction that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) makes between "confirmatory"…

The purpose of this study was to assess some of the effects of a nontraditional, experimental learning approach designed to improve rapid acquisition and long-term retention of quantitative communication skills (QCS) such as descriptive and inferential statistics, hypothesis formulation, experimental design, data characteristics, and data…

The reciprocal exchange of employees' work for pay that is central to employment relationships is viewed here through the lens of the psychological contract. A psychological contract involves promised inducements, promised contributions, delivered inducements, and delivered contributions: How an employee cognitively integrates these 4 elements is…

This article presents conceptual and empirical analyses of several of the "best practices" of learning and instruction, and demonstrates how violent video games use them effectively to motivate learners to persevere in acquiring and mastering a number of skills, to navigate through complex problems and changing environments, and to experiment with…

An experiment compared asynchronous versus synchronous instruction in an online quantitative course. Mann-Whitney U-tests, correlation, analysis of variance, t tests, and multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) were utilized to test the hypothesis that more high-quality online experiential learning interactions would increase grade.…

The sense that replicability is an important aspect of empirical science led Killeen (2005a) to define "p[subscript rep]," the probability that a replication will result in an outcome in the same direction as that found in a current experiment. Since then, several authors have praised and criticized 'p[subscript rep]," culminating…