In this commentary, we offer a set of visual tools that can assist education researchers, especially those in the field of mathematics, in developing cohesiveness from a mixed methods perspective, commencing at a study's research questions and literature review, through its data collection and analysis, and finally to its results. This expounds…

The 2012 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education was designed to provide up-to-date information and to identify trends in the areas of teacher background and experience, curriculum and instruction, and the availability and use of instructional resources. This compendium, one of a series, details the results of a survey of high school…

The 2012 National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education was designed to provide up-to-date information and to identify trends in the areas of teacher background and experience, curriculum and instruction, and the availability and use of instructional resources. This compendium, one of a series, details the results of a survey of high school…

Higher education experts tout learning outcomes assessment as a vehicle for program improvement. To this end the authors share a rubric designed explicitly to evaluate the quality of assessment and how it leads to program improvement. The rubric contains six general assessment areas, which are further broken down into 14 elements. Embedded within…

Tips on constructing survey instruments and examples of alternative formats for questionnaire items are provided in this paper. The 18 tips cover such areas as instructions for respondents, wording of questionnaire items, grouping of items, handling of difficult or sensitive questions, fixed-response items, open-ended questions, and questionnaire…

The "2004/06 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:04/06)" is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education to respond to the need for a national, comprehensive database concerning issues students may face in enrollment, persistence, progress, and attainment in postsecondary education and in consequent early rates of…

This digest reviews the basic building blocks of a structured interview, points out some of the pitfalls in interviewing, and suggests ways for researchers to avoid these difficulties to produce questions that have the best possibility of generating reliable and accurate data on the topics of interest. The data collection instrument is a document…

A context in which existing items may provide a convenient source of questions for questionnaires was explored through a case study making use of existing comparison groups. Two programs at Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), the Science and Engineering Research Semester (SERS) and the Laboratory Graduate Research Participation (Lab Grad)…

A practical application of generalizability theory, demonstrating how the variance components contribute to understanding and interpreting the data collected to evaluate a program, is described. The evaluation concerned 120 learning modules developed for the Dental Auxiliary Education Project. The goals of the project were to design, implement,…

As an integral part of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) the School Administrator Questionnaire has been used to collect information from public and private school administrators regarding their demographic characteristics, academic background, professional training, and…

This manual contains information for conducting regular student surveys at Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Questionnaires, designed for new, returning, and former student populations, are presented together with the methods by which the instruments should be administered. Guidelines for data analysis and report writing are also outlined. The…

Work on the development of the intensive time-series design was initiated because of the dissatisfaction with existing research designs. This dissatisfaction resulted from the paucity of data obtained from designs such as the pre-post and randomized posttest-only designs. All have the common characteristic of yielding data from only one or two…

This report describes the methods and procedures used for the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study: 1996-2001 (BPS:1996/2001). These students, who started their postsecondary education during the 1995-96 academic year, were first interviewed in 1996 as part of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:96). A follow-up…

This report supplies details of the design and data analysis of the 1986 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to allow the reader to judge the utility of the design, data quality, reasonableness of assumptions, appropriateness of data analyses, and generalizability of inferences made from the data. After an introduction by A. E.…

The 1992 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) monitored the performance of students in American schools in reading, mathematics, science, and writing. The sample consisted of more than 145,000 public and private school students in grades 4, 8, 11, and 12. This technical report provides details of instrument development, sample…