Studies of the effects of class attendance on class performance typically are quasi-experimental because students choose whether or not to attend class; that is, the samples are self-selecting. The lack of random assignment prevents one from establishing a causal relationship between attendance and performance. Relating attendance to performance…

Randomized experiments are commonly used to evaluate if particular interventions improve student achievement. While these experiments can establish that a treatment actually "causes" changes, typically the participants are not randomly selected from a well-defined population and therefore the results do not readily generalize. Three…

In winter 2011, I traveled to 12 communities located throughout the state of Idaho to moderate focus groups with teachers, parents of kindergarten-to-12th-grade (K-12) students, and community members with no children in K-12 education. The focus groups were conducted the first year of a 5-year study using multiple methods to explore the cultural…

The purpose of this study was to examine the quality of quantitative articles published in the "Journal of Counseling & Development." Quality concerns arose in regard to omissions of psychometric information of instruments, effect sizes, and statistical power. Type VI and II errors were found. Strengths included stated research…

Educational researchers commonly use the rule of thumb of "design effect smaller than 2" as the justification of not accounting for the multilevel or clustered structure in their data. The rule, however, has not yet been systematically studied in previous research. In the present study, we generated data from three different models…

In this article, the authors review International Large-Scale Assessment (ILSA)-based research over the last several decades, with specific attention on cross-national analysis of mean differences between and variation within countries in mathematics education. They discuss the role of sampling design and "opportunity to learn" (OTL)…

This article investigates the quality of social scientific listening research that reports numerical data to substantiate claims appearing in the "International Journal of Listening" between 1987 and 2011. Of the 225 published articles, 100 included one or more studies reporting numerical data. We frame our results in terms of eight…

Purpose: The main aim of this paper is to develop guidelines on the critical issues to consider in research design in an action research (AR) environment for SME network capability development. Design/methodology/approach: The issues in research design for AR studies are developed from the authors' experience in running learning sets but, in…

In this research, the level of quality of the qualitative research design used and the analytic mistakes made in the doctorate dissertations carried out in the field of education science in Turkey have been tried to be identified. Case study design has been applied in the study in which qualitative research techniques have been used. The universe…

Instrumental variable estimators hold the promise of enabling researchers to estimate the effects of educational treatments that are not (or cannot be) randomly assigned but that may be affected by randomly assigned interventions. Examples of the use of instrumental variables in such cases are increasingly common in educational and social science…

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, questioning and inter-sex (GLBTQI) youth, and those perceived to be GLBTQI, face extensive verbal and physical bullying in schools. Although increasing attention has been made at examining the safety concerns of sexual minority (GLBTQI) youth, there remain important gaps in the literature as well as significant…

Developmental trajectories provide the empirical foundation for theories about change processes during development. However, the ability to distinguish among alternative trajectories depends on how frequently observations are sampled. This study used real behavioral data, with real patterns of variability, to examine the effects of sampling at…

Studies of group differences in intelligence often invite conclusions about groups in general from studies of group differences in selected populations. The same design is used in the study of group differences in other traits as well. Investigators observe samples from two groups (e.g. men and women) in some accessible population, but seek to…

A revised version of Kaiser's Measure of Sampling Adequacy for factor-analytic data matrices is presented. (Author)

In some linear regression problems samples may be unwittingly drawn from a heterogeneous population. The exploratory procedure described in this paper can be used to detect heterogeneity in a regression problem associated with the intercept. (Author)