In this article, the author compares how her pupils responded to the same task when working individually and in small groups. She wants to look at communication and the effect that increasing the opportunities for collaborative group work has had on the quality of her pupils' understanding. She became concerned that the 23 "Level D" children (age…

This article provides an initial exploration of the impact of teachers' involvement with classroom-based research projects on their professional learning. Interviews with classroom teachers are used to explore their experiences of working with Graham Nuthall and his research teams, who focused on finding out how students' interactions with…

An English teacher provides some sentence comparison activities that enlarge students' linguistic resources for writing. He believes that students can learn to revise for style if they recognize the stylistic choices writers make.

A comparison of three urban school systems suggests that district offices can influence teaching through professional development. District leaders can structure their programs to provide coherent and content-focused professional development. The district orientation (vision, emphasis on professional development, use of human resources) set by the…

Given the new European institutional environment for education and training, policy and methodology for evaluation have become closely interwoven and stakes have been raised. This emerging situation calls for a robust reappraisal of existing comparative evaluation data and systems in the light of the perceived needs of European countries and of…

Two methods of assessing preference for stimuli (i.e., potential reinforcers) were compared for adult administrative assistant employees. During Phase 1, a survey method and a verbal choice method of assessing preference for 6 stimuli were administered. During Phase 2, a coupon system was used to determine which categories of stimuli actually…

Previous research on IT fluency in connection with non-IT majors points at the increasing need for more ''realistic'' courses teaching the use of complex and domain-specific IT applications. That research also suggests certain desirable course design characteristics, of which one of the most important is the close integration of realistic case…

Measuring the quality of service in higher education is increasingly important, particularly as fees introduce a more consumerist ethic amongst students. This paper aims to test and compare the relative efficacy of three measuring instruments of service quality (namely HEdPERF, SERVPERF and the moderating scale of HEdPERF-SERVPERF ) within a…

Collecting weather data is a traditional part of a meteorology unit at the middle level. However, making connections between the data and weather conditions can be a challenge. One way to make these connections clearer is to enter the data into a database. This allows students to quickly compare different fields of data and recognize which…

Study of the effect of transitions on individual and family outcomes is central to understanding families over the life course. There is little consensus, however, on the appropriate statistical methods needed to study transitions in panel data. This article compares lagged dependent variable (LDV) and change score (CS) methods for analyzing the…

Examined the cluster-derived typologies of males in a juvenile offender sample. Adolescent males, age 12-17, in a regional youth detention center were given the Behavior Assessment System for Children-Self Report-Adolescent (BASC-SRP-A; C. Reynolds &R. Kamphaus, 1992) and the Millon Adolescent Clinical Inventory (MACI; T. Millon, 1993).…

The theorists whose work appears in this issue have confronted the exercise presented to them in vastly different ways. The editors of this journal asked these theorists to consider how they would evaluate the Bunche-Da Vinci program, and to make and specify assumptions about the program context. The primary task, however, was to describe "a…

In this note we consider an experiment involving an urn and k balls with numbers 1, 2, 3, ..., k. The experiment consists of drawing n balls either with replacement or without replacement. We note some surprising results.

In this article, the authors discuss program evaluation of intervention studies when the outcome of interest is collected routinely at equally spaced intervals of time. They illustrate concepts using data from the American Stop Smoking Intervention Study, where the outcome is state per capita tobacco consumption. States differ widely in mean…

Because soils provide water, minerals, and a medium to anchor the roots of plants, measuring the basic physical/chemical components of soils is important to maintaining healthy garden plants and agricultural crops. Historically, soil analysis has been practiced to determine fertilizer and lime applications, soil fertility, and soil improvement…