Purpose: The research seeks to capture the "special character" of schools as seen through the eyes of the Principal and to introduce alternative understandings of ideological praxis' to challenge and unsettle the dominant ideology and logics of secondary schooling with consequent school design implications in South Australia.…

This study intends to develop a standardized instrument for measuring classroom teaching and learning in secondary chemistry lessons. Based on previous studies and interviews with expert teachers, the progression of five quality levels was constructed hypothetically to represent the quality of chemistry lessons in Chinese secondary schools. The…

Considering scoring validity as encompassing both reliable rating scale use and valid descriptor interpretation, this study reports on the validation of a CEFR-based scale that was co-constructed and used by novice raters. The research questions this paper wishes to answer are (a) whether it is possible to construct a CEFR-based rating scale with…

In this article, we provide a framework for analyzing and interpreting sources that inform a literature review or, as it is more aptly called, a research synthesis. Specifically, using Leech and Onwuegbuzie's (2007, 2008) frameworks, we delineate how the following four major source types inform research syntheses: talk, observations,…

Qualitative researchers in school psychology have a multitude of analyses available for data. The purpose of this article is to present several of the most common methods for analyzing qualitative data. Specifically, the authors describe the following 18 qualitative analysis techniques: method of constant comparison analysis, keywords-in-context,…

A Computer-Assisted Language Analysis System (CALAS) was developed as a syntactic and semantic analyzer of machine readable text in English. CALAS includes a set of computer programs, an algorithm for implementation, and human editors who assist the computer and its programmer in the processing of data. Data analysis is accomplished in three…

The Standardized Letter of Recommendation (SLR), a 28-item form, was created by ETS to supplement the qualitative rating of graduate school applicants' nonacademic qualities with a quantitative approach. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the following psychometric properties of the SLR using the Rasch rating-scale model: dimensionality,…