Students' creativity and self-efficacy in solving mathematical problems remain low. Students with Field Dependent (FD) and Field Independent (FI)cognitive styles have different creativity and self-efficacy. One learning model that is believed to increase students' creativity and self-efficacy is Problem Based Learning (PBL) model. This study aimed…

A basic question of instructional interventions is how effective it is in promoting student learning. This paper presents a study to determine the relative efficacy of different instructional strategies by applying an educational data mining technique, learning decomposition. We use logistic regression to determine how much learning is caused by…

This technical report and user's guide is designed to provide researchers with an overview of the design and implementation of the 2009 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), as well as with information on how to access the PISA 2009 data. This information is meant to supplement that presented in Organization for Economic Cooperation…

This report describes the derivation and evaluation of a method for comparing the performance standards for public school students set by different states. It is based on an approach proposed by McLaughlin and associates, which constituted an innovative attempt to resolve the confusion and concern that occurs when very different proportions of…

Confidence intervals are an important tool to indicate uncertainty of estimates and to give an idea of probable values of an estimate if a different sample from the population was drawn or a different sample of measures was used. Standard symmetric confidence intervals for proportion estimates based on a normal approximation can yield bounds…

Monitoring the Future (MTF), now in its 35th year, has become one of the nation's most relied-upon sources of information on changes taking place in licit and illicit psychoactive drug use among American adolescents, college students, young adults, and more recently, middle-aged adults. During the last three and a half decades, the study has…

This study described and compared the reading of sixth and eighth grade students both in and out of school using a unique data set collected with the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). On average, students read forty minutes a day out of class and seventeen minutes a day in class indicating that reading is a common leisure practice for…

Periodically, Maryland's sixth, eighth, tenth, and twelfth graders are surveyed to determine the nature, extent, and trend of alcohol, tobacco, and other drug (ATOD) use among adolescents. The "2007 Maryland Adolescent Survey (MAS)" presents the latest findings regarding ATOD use by Maryland's adolescents and compares State and local…

Large-scale educational assessments such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) sample examinees to whom an exam will be administered. In most situations the sampling design is not a simple random sample and must be accounted for in the estimating model. After reviewing the current operational estimation procedure for NAEP, this…

How can middle school counselors identify bullies? This study compared two methods of identifying bullies in a sample of 386 middle school students. A peer nomination survey identified many more bullies than did student self-report. Moreover, self-reported and peer nominated bullies differed in their types of bullying behaviors, level of general…