Decades of research has assessed the benefits of children's and adolescents' friendships, but friendships among youth often dissolve within a matter of months or years. Studies have investigated predictors and consequences of friendship stability with the expectation that, in order for friendships to have a positive or negative influence on youth,…

Innovation has become an increasingly important concept for Australian businesses in enabling them to continue to compete in an international market, but where does vocational education and training (VET) sit in this? To date, VET has been largely overlooked by the National Innovation and Science Agenda as a potential contributor in this field.…

Educational design research (EDR) is described as a complex research approach. The challenges resulting from this complexity are typically described as procedural, whereas EDR might also be challenging for different reasons, specifically for early career researchers. Yet, challenging experiences may be noteworthy in the process of learning to do…

The committees for the current Dutch context-based innovation in secondary science education employed teachers to design context-based curriculum materials. A study on the learning of science teachers in design teams for context-based curriculum materials is presented in this paper. In a correlation study, teachers with (n = 5 and 840 students)…

Unlike other disciplines in the social sciences, there has been relatively little attention paid to the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum. This article reports the results of a representative survey of 200 political science programs in the United States, examining requirements for quantitative methods, research methods,…

The project "The educational value of various aspects of multilingualism in the classroom of the Basque Country and of Friesland" concerns a comparative study of the languages in the schools in the Basque Autonomous Community and in the Province of Friesland. It is part of the agreement between the general administration of the Basque…

This paper puts forth a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to estimating higher education institutions' per-student education costs (PSCs) in an effort to redress a number of methodological problems endemic to such estimations, particularly the allocation of shared expenditures between education and other institutional activities. An example…

Describes a study that was conducted in The Netherlands to construct and validate an indicator of research performance through collecting peer judgments of journals from 385 international scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Quality of coverage by the Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index is examined. (24…

The eight chapters of this theme issue describe studies of learning environments conducted in a variety of conceptual and methodological perspectives by researchers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. Studies reflect perspectives on conceptualizations of learning environments that range from objectivist to more…

Reviews how carrying capacity for different environmental problems is operationalized. Discusses whether it is possible to compare threats, using the exceeding of carrying capacity as a yardstick. Points out problems in comparative threat analysis using three case studies: threats to European groundwater resources, threats to ecosystems in Europe,…

Medical expertise research methods were used to explore the relationship between auditing expertise and case representation. Subjects were 8 first-year economy students, 8 fourth-year auditing students, 8 postgraduate students in auditing, and 8 experienced auditors in the Netherlands, ranging in experience from only a limited knowledge of…

Little is known about demographic, deafness-related, and diagnostic characteristics of deaf and partially hearing people with psychosocial or psychiatric problems. A study was conducted derived from data from intake assessment interviews of people with hearing loss treated at a Dutch ambulatory mental health center for the deaf between 1987 and…

Reports study which compared the value of Piagetian tasks--seriation, conservation and multiple classification--to that of traditional intelligence tests--Cattell and PMA 5 to 7 subtests--as predictors of number language, simple computation, and verbal arithmetic achievement in 312 children from kindergarten to grade 4. Fifty references are…

This paper discusses the contribution of international studies on educational effectiveness in the light of 4 papers presented at the new ICSEI Methodology of Research and Effectiveness (MORE) Network in Barcelona in January 2005 and published in this issue of the journal. A brief historical overview is used to provide a context for these papers…

Mail survey, telephone survey, and keeping time were compared as methods of assessing teaching time for 74 sixth grade teachers teaching language in the Netherlands. Results suggest that each of the three methods can be used to assess the mean total score, but none can assess individual scores. (SLD)