The paradigm on which a methodological approach is developed determines the situations in which its application will be most appropriate. The quantitative approach implies a positivist paradigm, the basis of which is cause-and-effect relationships, as well as the questioning and verifying of existing theories. Positivism aims to prove that…

Upright faces are thought to be processed more holistically than inverted faces. In the widely used composite face paradigm, holistic processing is inferred from interference in recognition performance from a to-be-ignored face half for upright and aligned faces compared with inverted or misaligned faces. We sought to characterize the nature of…

Configural frequency analysis and log-linear modeling are presented as person-centered analytic approaches for the analysis of categorical or categorized data in multi-way contingency tables. Person-centered developmental psychology, based on the holistic interactionistic perspective of the Stockholm working group around David Magnusson and Lars…

As U.S. institutions continue to welcome larger and more diverse populations of international students, campus support offices are also expected to adjust their programming and outreach strategies to engage a wider student audience and provide them with key information and services. This quantitative study examines the communications preferences…

Methods for detecting differential item functioning (DIF) and item bias are typically used in the process of item analysis when developing new measures; adapting existing measures for different populations, languages, or cultures; or more generally validating test score inferences. In 2007 in "Language Assessment Quarterly," Zumbo…

Nationally, developmental mathematics courses have some of the highest failure and withdrawal rates of postsecondary courses. A wide range of factors may be contributing to students' struggles in these courses. In order to help identify these factors, we asked students enrolled in developmental mathematics to identify factors interfering with…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to do methodological review of the literature on educational leaders and emotions that includes 49 empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 1992 and 2012. Design/methodology/approach: The work systematically analyzes descriptive information, methods, and designs in these studies, and their…

This study identifies pathways to educational success among refugees. Data are from an original online survey of Somali diaspora and in-depth qualitative interviews with Somali refugee students educated in the Dadaab refugee camps of Kenya. This research builds on Bronfenbrenner's ecological model to consider both the locally and globally situated…

Decision making in most universities is taught within the conventional OR/MS (Operations Research/Management Science) paradigm. This paradigm is known to be "hard" since it is consisted of mathematical tools, and normally suitable for solving structured problems. In complex situations the conventional OR/MS paradigm proves to be…

The present study is aimed at creating a holistic fractal model (HFM) of autonomous learning for English acquisition in a blended environment of e-studies in adult non-formal education on the basis of the theories and paradigms of philosophy, psychology and education for sustainable development to promote the development of adult learners'…

This study explores the potential of adopting a whole-school approach to the pastoral care module in a Postgraduate Certificate of Education Programme to ensure that all newly qualified teachers practice effective pastoral care in their classrooms and promote the learners' academic engagement and performance. A non-experimental survey research…

Numerous second language acquisition (SLA) researchers have tried to define grammatical difficulty in second and foreign language acquisition--often as part of an attempt to relate the efficacy of different types of instruction to the degree of difficulty of grammatical structures. The resulting proliferation of definitions and the lack of a…

This paper explores how educational psychologists working in a training/consultative way can enable teachers to manage challenging pupil behaviour more effectively. It sets out a rationale which encourages schools to embrace a group based teacher peer-support system as part of regular school development. It then explores the usefulness of the…

Useful assessment outcomes (as manifest through assigned scores) must show reasonable variation across children because it is that variation that presumably defines children's individual differences. Alternatively it is conceivable that some portion of the variability in assessment outcomes does not reflect child differences but rather differences…

The need to educate a competitive workforce is a global problem. In the US, for example, despite billions of dollars spent to improve the educational system, approximately 35% of students never finish high school. The drop rate among some demographic groups is as high as 50-60%. At the college level in the US only 30% of students graduate from…