Properly defining a population ensures that resources, such as funding and access, meet the needs, expectations, and intended outcomes for those represented. Ethical concerns arise when a target population, such as the English Language Learner population, is defined in numerous yet incomplete ways, and differently in research and in state policies…

When respondents fail to use response scales of survey questionnaires as intended, latent variable modeling of data can produce disordered category thresholds. The objective of this paper is to show the usefulness of the Rasch modeling features to explore different ways of collapsing categories so that they are properly ordered and fit for further…

Three years of assessment data have been collected since The No Child Left Behind Act took effect. The purpose of this paper was to determine what effect adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements have had on student achievement as measured by achievement level categorization across years. In measuring how well students are achieving in the wake…

The paper analyses qualitative data on the topic of "international graduate student life," and especially on the cultural and academic adaptation processes that graduates go through in a new environment. The paper describes and discusses the process of the work on the data. It deals with the theories and hypotheses that were generated during the…

EFL learners from three language institutes in Brazil answered the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning--SILL--to self-report how they go about learning English. They emerged as balanced users of various strategies with a tendency to use metacognitive and social strategies to learn the language. This tendency, further reinforced by factor…