Engagement is one of the most widely misused and overgeneralized constructs found in the educational, learning, instructional, and psychological sciences. The articles in this special issue represent a wide range of traditions and highlight several key conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and analytical issues related to defining and measuring…

Engagement is one of the hottest research topics in the field of educational psychology. Research shows that multifarious benefits occur when students are engaged in their own learning, including increased motivation and achievement. However, there is little agreement on a concrete definition and effective measurement of engagement. This special…

While the evidence for the effectiveness of the use of stories in science teaching and learning is strengthening in current research and literature, the intervention itself, namely, the science story, still suffers from a lack of definition and conception. The purpose of this paper is to determine the amount of narrative relative to non-narrative…

The absence of universally accepted definitions for direct and indirect assessment motivates the purpose of this article: to offer definitions that are literature-based and theoretically driven, meeting K. Lewin's (1945) dictum that, "There is nothing so practical as a good theory" (p. 129). The authors synthesize the literature to…

When planning and evaluating community-level initiatives focused on policy and environment change, it is useful to have estimates of the impact on behavioral outcomes of particular strategies (e.g., building a new walking trail to promote physical activity). We have created a measure of estimated strategy-level impact--"population dose"--based on…

Although curiosity is an undeniably important aspect of children's cognitive development, a universally accepted operational definition of children's curiosity does not exist. Almost all of the research on measuring curiosity has focused on adults, and has used predominately questionnaire-type measures that are not appropriate for young children.…

In this dissertation, I develop a definition and regional measure of entrepreneurship that will aid entrepreneurship research and economic development policy. My new indicators represent an improvement over current measures of entrepreneurship. The chief contribution of these new indicators is that they incorporate innovation, which others ignore.…

This paper compares the present official poverty measure with a relative measure of poverty. The comparison is made both conceptually and empirically. These two aspects comprise the two major parts of the paper. Within the first part, the conceptual section, various issues common to both poverty measures as well as the measures themselves are…

This paper examines some of the implications, including geographic and residential considerations, of adopting a relative poverty defintion which would fix the poverty threshold at some proportion of median income. The major virtues of such a definition are that it is explicitly relative and it is easy to understand and construct. The major flaw…

This paper provides a conceptual analysis of ethnicity in terms of methods used to measure ethnic persistence and intensity. (Author/AM)

This study attempts to clarify some of the issues involved in defining the effectiveness of compensatory education programs. It discusses the extent to which conclusions about the effectiveness of compensatory education programs are affected by two major components of an evaluation: the period of time on which the evaluation is based and the…

This study is a two-part analysis aimed at determining what differences occur in the incidence of poverty when different definitions of income are employed and when the time frame of analysis is changed. The first part of the analysis concentrates on school-aged children, while the second part studies families. The study is based on data from the…

One of a series of instructional booklets designed to introduce adult education program planners to the basic concepts integral to and alternative strategies for conducting needs assessments, this instructional booklet deals with determining what information to collect when conducting a needs assessment. Described first is the relationship of the…

Three basic areas of definition, measurement, and research, voiced as concerns by members of the National Council of Measurement in Education (NCME) to its Task Force on Measurement Problems in Competency-Based Programs, are used as an organizer for a sponsored symposia and the papers in this monograph. The problem of the definition of competency…

A model for research and evaluation in outdoor education is presented in this paper which includes a bibliography of representative research in outdoor, experiential education. The model stresses close interaction between program designers and evaluators and rests on the premise that the strength of outdoor education--interaction between people,…