'School league tables' summarising the performance of secondary schools in England have been published annually since 1992. Although now a firmly established feature of the educational landscape, they have attracted criticism from those who point to their unintended negative consequences. These include 'teaching to the test', entering pupils for…

Background: Enhanced uptake of systematic reviews that use qualitative comparative analyses (QCA) requires knowing how end-users interpret such findings. The study purpose was to identify effective approaches to communicating results from a QCA within a systematic review. Methods: Sequential exploratory mixed methods design; thematic analysis of…

We discuss a recent development in the set theoretic analysis of data sets characterized by limited diversity. Ragin, in developing his Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), developed a standard analysis that produces parsimonious, intermediate, and complex Boolean solutions of truth tables. Schneider and Wagemann argue this standard analysis…

Measures of student disadvantage--or risk--are critical components of equity-focused education policies. However, the risk measures used in contemporary policies have significant limitations, and despite continued advances in data infrastructure and analytic capacity, there has been little innovation in these measures for decades. We develop a new…

New technologies have completely altered the ways that citizens can access data. Indeed, emerging online data sources give citizens access to an enormous amount of numerical information that provides new sorts of evidence used to influence public opinion. In this new environment, two trends have had a significant impact on our increasingly…

The article reveals specific features of functioning systems of higher education quality monitoring at the present stage, taking into account national traditions, historical experience and mentality of the population. The article introduces a comparative analysis of monitoring actors at national, regional and local levels in two countries. The…

Learning from visual representations is enhanced when learners appropriately integrate corresponding visual and verbal information. This study examined the effects of two methods of promoting integration, color coding and labeling, on learning about probabilistic reasoning from a table and text. Undergraduate students (N = 98) were randomly…

Text analysis has become an important research activity in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Statistical text mining and natural language processing have been shown to be very effective for extracting useful information from medical documents. However, neither of these techniques is effective at extracting the information stored in…

The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of an instructional intervention on enhancement the pre-service science teachers' (PSTs) science process skills (SPSs) and to identify problems in using SPSs through Laboratory Applications in Science Education-I course (LASE-I). One group pretest-posttest pre-experimental design was employed. An…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical comparison of two measures of school success -- a value-added assessment system and the federally-mandated system of adequate yearly progress (AYP) -- to identify highly effective urban schools in the USA and to explore the predictive relationship between evidence-based decision-making…

This quantitative investigation examined the influence of low and high self-efficacy on candidate teacher academic performance in a foreign language teaching methodology course through testing the speculation that high self-efficacy levels would improve pedagogical-content knowledge (PCK). Positivism guided the research design at the levels of…

The TIMSS 2011 International Database includes data for all questionnaires administered as part of the TIMSS 2011 assessment. This supplement contains the international version of the TIMSS 2011 background questionnaires and curriculum questionnaires in the following 10 sections: (1) Fourth Grade Student Questionnaire; (2) Fourth Grade Home…

Little is known about levels of personal growth attributed by students to typical college life experiences. This paper documents two studies of student self-reported and posttraumatic growth and compares growth levels across populations. Both studies measure student attributions of cause to academic and non-academic experiences, respectively. It…

This study responds to a request from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards to analyze National Board certification among high school teachers in understudied subject areas and locales to help fill gaps in the research literature. The authors also were asked to use multiple indicators of performance. The research team selected two…

The "Condition of Education" summarizes important developments and trends in education using the latest available data. For the 2009 edition, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) prepared this supplemental report to take a closer look at U.S. student performance on international assessments. This special analysis examines…