This paper synthesizes research evidence pertaining to several so-called 21st century skills: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, metacognition, and motivation. We provide a rationale for focusing on these five skills and explain their importance as educational outcomes. We then summarize peer-reviewed research published in education and…

Clinical significance is an important concept in research, particularly in education and the social sciences. The present article first compares clinical significance to other measures of "significance" in statistics. The major methods used to determine clinical significance are explained and the strengths and weaknesses of clinical significance…

In this paper the role of qualitative research in special education is examined. The implications of an earlier naturalistic study are cited, an important one being the tendency in the literature to oversimplify the naturalistic paradigm; and the case is made that implementing such a paradigm is a "labor intensive" approach to research…

This paper investigates measurement issues related to elements of the Internet and calls for a standardized measuring scheme to resolve the problem of the measurement. The dilemmas in measuring the elements of the Internet are identified, and previous studies are reviewed. Elements of the Internet are categorized into population, usage, protocol…

Vocational education researchers have relied heavily on opinionnaires to measure opinions and attitudes. Usually respondents are asked to indicate their degree of agreement to an attitude or opinion statement. Where significant statistical differences exist for opinions/attitudes there is still always the problem of confidence with which…

In this paper, a parallel is drawn between the sex differences in moral reasoning suggested by Gilligan (1982) and a masculine and a feminine approach to measurement and statistics. A masculine approach could be seen to focus on the application of the rules of mathematics and statistics to measurement problems in ways which rational observers…

This research describes the statistics and interpretations currently used for reporting discriminant analysis results and attempts to provide some approximate guidelines. Articles in the last 10 years of the American Educational Research Journal (AERT) were scanned. Eighteen studies containing 86 different discriminant analyses were identified and…

This panel's goal was to improve the validity and utility of measurement, design, and analysis in research on teaching through the stimulation of new methodological knowledge and through the identification and translation of useful existing knowledge from other descriptions. This panel tried to identify as many methodological problems as possible…

This paper summarizes a qualitative approach called the "method of essence" for use within-depth interview projects to further understand the deeper unities of a particular phenomenon of interest, developed by K. Witz in his research and in connection with his work with doctoral students (K. Witz, D. Goodwin, R. Hart, and H. Thomas, 1998). It was…

A theoretical and conceptual analysis of techniques used to measure education's contribution to productivity is followed by a discussion of the empirical measures implemented by various researchers. Standard methods of growth accounting make sense for simple measurement of factor contributions where outputs are well measured and when factor growth…

Two pathways in the development of a scientific concept can be differentiated: the limited-operationalization approach, which capitalizes upon the availability of an instrument; and the popular consensus approach, which comes from a sudden interest and popularity of the phenomenon in the real world. The phenomenon of mentoring is a contemporary…

Behavior analysis provides a unique way of coming to understand intrapersonal and interpersonal communication behaviors, and focuses on control techniques available to a speaker and counter-control techniques available to a listener. "Time-series methodology" is a convenient term because it subsumes under one label a variety of baseline…

This paper discusses problems encountered by researchers in applying the guidelines of Finkelhor (1986) for the selection of research instruments for gathering data on the effects of child sexual abuse. Discussion focuses on measures of effects of the abuse experience, measures of post-abuse experiences, and of mediating variables. The data…

The development of procedures by which test publishers can screen individual purchasers to minimize the possibility of test misuse is described. The Test User Qualifications Working Group (TUQWoG), an outgrowth of the Joint Committee on Testing Practices, was formed to address the prevention of test misuse through improved methods of screening…

The purpose of this study was to develop an instrument designed to assess teacher job satisfaction in an educational setting and then to examine system level, personal, and demographic variables using a newly created measure of teacher job satisfaction. The sample population included elementary and secondary teachers from eight representative…