There is a need to improve the ways in which Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) handles qualitative data. To this end, we propose to include ideas and routines from Grounded Theory (GT) in QCA. We will first argue that there is a natural fit between the two on the ontological level. On the methodological level, we will demonstrate in what ways…

This article proposes a study design developed to disentangle the objective characteristics of a learning situation from individuals' subjective perceptions of that situation. The term objective characteristics refers to the agreement across students, whereas subjective perceptions refers to inter-individual heterogeneity. We describe a novel…

Globalization is a multi-dimensional phenomenon as it leads to high mobility in social, political, economic and value fields and besides reduction of the gap between time and place presents new interpretations of politics, economy, culture, government, authority and security. The present study aimed to explain the educational and cultural…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to relate the practice of organisational learning in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to the organisational life cycle (OLC), contextualising the differential aspects of an integrated relationship between them. Design/methodology/approach: It is a mixed-method study with two consecutive phases. In…

Many current national and institutional education policies address the issue of raising participation amongst young people and enhancing employability after leaving school or university. What sort of information are these policies built on? This paper compares national information systems from the last three decades across Europe that gather…

Two sampling-and-classification-based procedures were developed for automated test assembly: the Cell Only and the Cell and Cube methods. A simulation study based on a 540-item bank was conducted to compare the performance of the procedures with the performance of a mixed-integer programming (MIP) method for assembling multiple parallel test…

Since 2010, the whole national cohort Key Stage 2 (KS2) National Curriculum test in science in England has been replaced with a sampling test taken by pupils at the age of 11 from a nationally representative sample of schools annually. The study reported in this paper compares the performance of different subgroups of the samples (classified by…

This study investigated how best to study a matrix. Fifty-three participants studied a matrix topically (1 column at a time), categorically (1 row at a time), or in a unified way (all at once). Results revealed that categorical and unified study produced higher: (a) performance on relationship and fact tests, (b) study material satisfaction, and…

How can humans acquire relational representations that enable analogical inference and other forms of high-level reasoning? Using comparative relations as a model domain, we explore the possibility that bottom-up learning mechanisms applied to objects coded as feature vectors can yield representations of relations sufficient to solve analogy…

Recent evidence suggests that the recognition of an object's presence and its explicit recognition are temporally closely related. Here we re-examined the time course (using a fine and a coarse temporal resolution) and the sensitivity of three possible component processes of visual object recognition. In particular, participants saw briefly…

We propose a nonparametric (or distribution-free) procedure for testing the equality of several population variances (or scale parameters). The proposed test is a modification of Bakir's (1989, Commun. Statist., Simul-Comp., 18, 757-775) analysis of means by ranks (ANOMR) procedure for testing the equality of several population means. A proof is…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to discuss the benefits and limitations of, and considerations in, developing a typology of assisted living (AL). Design and Methods: We conducted a review and comparison of nine AL typologies drawn from the literature. Results: Typologies addressed matters related to the structure, process, population, and…

A linear classification rule (used with equal covariance matrices) was contrasted with a quadratic rule (used with unequal covariance matrices) for accuracy of internal and external classification. The comparisons were made for seven situations which resulted from combining three data conditions (equal and unequal covariance matrices, minimal and…

Approximately 30% of children in foster care have severe emotional, behavioral, or developmental problems. A systematic research synthesis of empirical studies was conducted in an attempt to identify and classify therapeutic interventions for foster children. Utilizing a treatment protocol classification system, empirical studies were classified…

A review of the literature on a variety of issues related to testing vocabulary knowledge in a second language addresses these topics: problems in estimating vocabulary size, including the related questions of what constitutes a word, how a sample should be selected, and what are the criteria for knowing a word; sampling the basic and specialized…