Following Mayhew and Simonoff's recent work (2015), we describe effect coding, an alternative to dummy coding, and present an example of its application for research and assessment in higher education and student affairs.

Although contemporary models of faculty involvement in publicly engaged scholarship recognize the important influence of disciplines on faculty members, few studies have investigated disciplinary variations empirically. This study used the Biglan classification of academic disciplines to analyze publicly engaged scholarly activities reported by…

Measures of socioeconomic status (SES) are routinely used in analyses of achievement data to increase statistical power, statistically control for the effects of SES, and enhance causality arguments under the premise that the SES-achievement relationship is moderate to strong. Empirical evidence characterizing the strength of the SES-achievement…

Given that so many college students take Introduction to Sociology or Social Problems or both, we wondered about the amount of content overlap in these courses. We designed a study that used content analysis of syllabi from these courses in order to measure the amount of convergence between the two classes. In our sample, nearly 70 percent of the…

The purpose of this article is to describe effect coding as an alternative quantitative practice for analyzing and interpreting categorical, race-based independent variables in higher education research. Unlike indicator (dummy) codes that imply that one group will be a reference group, effect codes use average responses as a means for…

Evidence from 73 programmes in 14 U.K universities sheds light on the typical student experience of assessment over a three-year undergraduate degree. A previous small-scale study in three universities characterised programme assessment environments using a similar method. The current study analyses data about assessment patterns using descriptive…

Based on in-person, task-based usability testing and interviews, the authors' library Web site was recently overhauled in order to improve user experience. This led to the authors' interest in additional usability testing methods and test environments that would most closely fit their library's goals and situation. The appeal of card sorting…

This study investigated the mediation effect of research skills proficiency on the relationship between core self-evaluations and research engagement among Master of Education students in Uganda. Questionnaire surveys including closed ended questions were administered to two cohorts of the students, 2011/2012 and 2012/2013, (N = 102). Results…

As speakers interact, they add references to their common ground, which they can then reuse to facilitate listener comprehension. However, all references are not equally likely to be reused. The purpose of this study was to shed light on how the speakers' conceptualizations of the referents under discussion affect reuse (along with a generation…

The purpose of this paper is to describe effect coding as an alternative quantitative practice for analyzing and interpreting categorical, multi-raced independent variables in higher education research. Not only may effect coding enable researchers to get closer to respondents' original intentions, it allows for more accurate analyses of all race…

Reflective journals have emerged as an effective means of monitoring and developing reflective practice in higher education, as part of a wider metacognitive strategy to transform traditional learning approaches. In addition, assessment procedures of reflective journals appear to be an important factor in enhancing commitment to learning and…

Librarians often wish to know whether readers in a particular discipline favor e-books or print books. Because print circulation and e-book usage statistics are not directly comparable, it can be hard to determine the relative interest of readers in the two types of books. This study demonstrates a two-step method by which librarians can assess…

People spontaneously gesture when they speak (co-speech gestures) and when they solve problems silently (co-thought gestures). In this study, we first explored the relationship between these 2 types of gestures and found that individuals who produced co-thought gestures more frequently also produced co-speech gestures more frequently (Experiments…

Gender-related challenges in learning technical courses are universal phenomenon. These challenges could restrain female students from achieving their fullest potential. The main focus of this study, therefore, is to examine self-recognized challenges faced by undergraduate female students in pursuing engineering at the School of Engineering…

Introduction: The study describes the conditions for long-term preservation of the content of the institutional repositories of Swedish higher education institutions based on an investigation of how deposited files are managed with regards to file format and how representatives of the repositories describe the functions of the repositories.…