Extension recognizes the importance of data in guiding programming decisions at the local level. However, allocating personnel resources and specializations at the state level is a more complex process. The West Virginia University Extension Service has adopted a data-driven process to determine the number, location, and specializations of county…

This paper seeks mainly to contribute to the debate on how the relative degree of development of a country should be measured by proposing an indicator to build on the valuable starting point provided by the Human Development Index (HDI). The indicator proposed is called the "Composite, Dynamic Human Development Index". It incorporates in a simple…

We present "study navigator," an algorithmically-generated aid for enhancing the experience of studying from electronic textbooks. The study navigator for a section of the book consists of helpful "concept references" for understanding this section. Each concept reference is a pair consisting of a concept phrase explained…

During the transition period between the use of exclusively old SAT® scores and the use of exclusively new SAT scores, college admission offices will be receiving both types of scores from students. Making an admission decision based on new SAT scores can be challenging at first because institutions have methods, procedures, and models based on…

Monolingual and parallel concordancers have both been found to benefit second-language (L2) grammatical development. However, the relative benefits of these two concordancer types remains unclear. The present study compares learning outcomes and learners' perceptions of a monolingual English (Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA) and a…

We use statewide administrative data from Missouri to examine the role of high schools in explaining students' initial college and major placements at 4-year public universities. To facilitate our investigation of postsecondary sorting, we develop a "preparation and persistence index" (PPI) for each university-by-major cell in the…

Measuring the distance between countries and the goal of equality of opportunity in education has been the focus of recent contributions in the economic literature, which have concentrated either on intergroup gaps in access to a given level of studies or on intergroup gaps in educational achievement. We argue that both aspects are important and…

This cumulative author index was developed as a service for the readership of Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities. It was prepared as a resource for scholars wishing to access the 391 articles published in volumes 36-45 of this journal. It also serves as a timely supplement to the 25-year (1966-1990) cumulative author…

This article presents the results of theoretical analysis of existing approaches to the categories of the "intellectual capital" and "intellectual potential" of an organization. The authors identified the specific peculiarities of developing the intellectual potential of a university and propose their own view of its structure.…

Too often, psychological debates become polarized into dichotomous positions. Such polarization may have occurred with respect to Campbell's (1960) blind variation and selective retention (BVSR) theory of creativity. To resolve this unnecessary controversy, BVSR was radically reformulated with respect to creative problem solving. The reformulation…

The inverted index is the main data structure used by all the major search engines. Search engines build an inverted index on their collection to speed up query processing. As the size of the web grows, the length of the inverted list structures, which can easily grow to hundreds of MBs or even GBs for common terms (roughly linear in the size of…

Test-retest studies for assessing stability and change are widely used in different domains and allow improved or additional individual estimates of interest to be obtained. However, if these estimates are to be validly interpreted the responses given at Time-2 must be free of retest effects, and the fulfilment of this assumption must be…

As an important yet intricate linguistic feature in English language, synonymy poses a great challenge for second language learners. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this article compares the usage of "learn" and "acquire" used in natural…

Cognitive Diagnostic Models (CDMs) aim to provide information about the degree to which individuals have mastered specific attributes that underlie the success of these individuals on test items. The Q-matrix is a key element in the application of CDMs, because contains links item-attributes representing the cognitive structure proposed for solve…

This paper aims to investigate the effects of the alignment entailed in the continuation task on syntactic complexity in L2 written production. A total number of 48 sophomores majoring in English at a university in China were randomly assigned to two groups, one is the continuation group and the other is the topic writing group. The current study…