Mathematics teachers make numerous decisions that form lessons that in turn greatly influence what students learn. In making these decisions, teachers rely on their curricular reasoning (CR) to decide on what mathematics to teach, how to structure their lesson, and what problems or tasks to use to achieve their lesson goals. However, teachers…

I propose that the grounded types analytical method (GTAM) is a systematic and useful means of typology construction for qualitative studies. GTAM arose within European social sciences in response to a need to schematize qualitative typology and to explicate qualitative types more precisely. GTAM is applicable to a variety of qualitative…

Educational Data Mining is an emerging discipline which seeks to develop methods to explore large amounts of data from educational settings, in order to understand students' behavior, interests and results in a better way. In recent years there have been various works related to this specialty and multiple data mining techniques derived from this…

This article summarizes a comprehensive, systems-oriented framework designed to improve the use of a wide variety of evidence sources to address population-wide obesity problems. The L.E.A.D. framework (for "Locate" the evidence, "Evaluate" the evidence, "Assemble" the evidence, and inform "Decisions"),…

When conducting item reviews, analysts evaluate an array of statistical and graphical information to assess the fit of a field test (FT) item to an item response theory model. The process can be tedious, particularly when the number of human reviews (HR) to be completed is large. Furthermore, such a process leads to decisions that are susceptible…

Recursive partitioning methods have become popular and widely used tools for nonparametric regression and classification in many scientific fields. Especially random forests, which can deal with large numbers of predictor variables even in the presence of complex interactions, have been applied successfully in genetics, clinical medicine, and…

Community college students typically have access to a large selection of courses and programs, and therefore the student transcripts at any one college or college system tend to be very diverse. As a result, it is difficult for faculty, administrators, and researchers to understand the course-taking patterns of students in order to determine what…

To gain a greater understanding about how people comprehend a set of directions, a macro-level research approach is needed. Researchers must first decide on the domain of activity that is to be investigated. In our society instructions are used for building things from parts, disassembling things, determining the functional characteristics of…

Presents an overview of the four component parts of the activity of problem solving. These are the types of problems to be solved, the necessary prerequisites, the strategies, and the elements used in applying the strategies. (HM)

Seventeen Southern California school districts participated in a pilot study intended to develop a framework for classifying district policies on retaining students. It was assumed that differences in district policy created varying levels of objectification of standards for decision making and varying degrees of work effort needed to implement…

This study undertakes to clarify the concept of a normative basis for curriculum research by considering four possible interpretations: (1) a set of substantive moral principles, (2) such a set taken as an integral part of a putative curriculum theory, (3) a meta-strategy governing curriculum decisionmaking, or (4) the norms which specify the…

A taxonomy of levels of analysis in mass media decision making is presented in this paper, and a strategy is proposed for incorporating the different levels into the design of research. Following a clarification of the concept of influence and its relationship to the levels of analysis used in the taxonomic structure, the paper describes the…

"Stimulated recall" is a generic term used to identify a variety of interviewing techniques designed to provide access to teachers' thoughts during interactive teaching. The methods usually involve audio or videotape recordings of classroom activities, whereby teachers are to "recall" what they were thinking at the actual time of the taping by…

This study was conducted to fulfill two objectives: to gather the data necessary to define the core collection, i.e., a subset of the holdings that can be identified with reasonable assurance as being able to fulfill a certain predetermined percentage of the future demand on the present collection, and to examine the value of these data as a…

A DESCRIPTION IS GIVEN OF CONCEPTS, METHODS, AND A STRATEGY TO AID TRAINING OFFICERS AND OTHERS RESPONSIBLE FOR PROGRAMS OF CHANGE IN CONDUCTING EVALUATION STUDIES INVOLVING SYSTEMATIC PLANNING, CONTROL, AND ASSESSMENT OF THE PROCESS OF CHANGE. BEGINNING WITH A MODEL OF PERCEPTION AND OF ITS APPLICATION TO LEARNING, THE AUTHOR DISCUSSES A TYPOLOGY…