Mathematics teachers make numerous decisions that form lessons that in turn greatly influence what students learn. In making these decisions, teachers rely on their curricular reasoning (CR) to decide on what mathematics to teach, how to structure their lesson, and what problems or tasks to use to achieve their lesson goals. However, teachers…

The National Defense University (NDU) trains officers to develop their academic and professional skills. To accomplish this, the university offers two mandatory courses on methodological training for military technology students for master level education. The first course was theoretically oriented, and the second course was practically oriented.…

When conducting an exploratory factor analysis, the decision regarding the number of factors to retain following factor extraction is one that the researcher should consider very carefully, as the decision can have a dramatic effect on results. Although there are numerous strategies that can and should be utilized when making this decision,…

Describes in-basket exercises as a research methodology for examining how managers allocate attention and respond to information in their environment. Issues in organizational information processing and decision making to which this methodology might be applicable are discussed, and other methodologies for studying information processing are…

The research methodology literature in recent years has included a full frontal assault on statistical significance testing. An entire edition of "Experimental Education" explored this controversy. The purpose of this paper is to promote the position that while significance testing by itself may be flawed, it has not outlived its…

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effectiveness of four methods of handling missing data. Effectiveness was defined as the probability of reproducing the covariance matrix of the target sample accurately. Effectiveness of the missing data methods was assessed by manipulating the proportion of cases containing missing values…

A discussion of the data obtained from grammaticality judgment tasks argues that despite the light shed by these data on problems of second language acquisition theory, there is not yet adequate knowledge of how to interpret those data within a coherent model of performance of the tasks. Therefore, it is concluded, there is no basis for deciding…

Research methods and findings relative to improving understanding of program evaluation usage patterns are reported. This study further refines an evaluation usage model consisting of five basic evaluation usage types: communication, learning, motivation, accountability and decision-making. This usage concept has been expanded to include…

Content analysis is a systematic and objective technique which reduces into smaller sub-parts existing communications. It is the analytical reduction of a text to a standard set of statistically manipulatable symbols representing the presence, intensity, or frequency of characteristics. A case study of the use of content analysis is the U.S.…

This paper suggests that statistical significance testing and effect size are two sides of the same coin; they complement each other, but do not substitute for one another. Good research practice requires that both should be taken into consideration to make sound quantitative decisions. A Monte Carlo simulation experiment was conducted, and a…

The author recounts how certain things have remained constant even though his work focus had changed from a concentration on human services and substance abuse to evaluating the impact of computer networks. Balancing the requirements of good methodology with the needs of decision makers remains central. (SLD)

Presents a philosophical grounding for valuation in educational administration. It is based on a naturalistic perspective that shows how scientific methods and relevant concepts and explanations can be used in situations requiring moral deliberation. Examples illustrate how administrators can use tentative explanations and consequence analysis to…

This document contains four papers about the ideological structure of personality. A proposal for a theoretical and methodological reworking of the life-historical inquiry of personality psychology is presented along with a report of some preliminary studies that employ an intensive life-history approach to a distinct topic within the context of…

Most of what may be construed as political science has always proceeded through induction, which depends heavily on the insight, intuition, and personal brilliance of the particular author. Another approach that is closely associated with the early induction through examples is the expert system. The outcomes of this approach are not measures of…

To gain a greater understanding about how people comprehend a set of directions, a macro-level research approach is needed. Researchers must first decide on the domain of activity that is to be investigated. In our society instructions are used for building things from parts, disassembling things, determining the functional characteristics of…