Education researchers use surveys widely. Yet, critics question respondents' ability to provide high-quality responses. As schools increasingly use student surveys to drive policymaking, respondents' (lack of) motivation to provide quality responses may threaten the wisdom of using surveys for data-based decision-making. To better understand…

Online collaborative writing tools provide an efficient way to complete a writing task. However, existing tools only focus on technological affordances and ignore the importance of social affordances in a collaborative learning environment. This article describes a learning analytic system that analyzes writing behaviors, and creates…

The learning sciences community's interest in learning analytics (LA) has been growing steadily over the past several years. Three recent symposia on the theme (at the American Educational Research Association 2011 and 2012 annual conferences, and the International Conference of the Learning Sciences 2012), organized by Paulo Blikstein, led…

Innatism is the belief that most of the human personality can be determined by genes. This ideology is dangerous, especially when it claims to be scientific. The present study investigates conceptions of 1060 students from Estonia and France related to genetic determinism of some human behaviours. Factors taken into account included students'…

Examines the extent to which the declining affection for the presidency among maturing youth results from increased knowledge about the presidency and about general political and social issues. Findings indicate that as youths' cognitive abilities become more mature, they find it easier to assimilate conflicting information and resist adult…

The purpose of the study was to investigate the attitudes and practices toward drugs by users and nonusers at Queensborough Community College and the relationship of these attitudes and practices to selected psychosocial factors. (Author)

Discusses a study in which attitudes and value orientations of 162 black college students were assessed to determine their individual achievement and occupational goals. (Author/DB)

Graduate schools have been admitting more and more students older than the "traditional" 18- to 24-year-old campus population. These adult learners may come to their programs of study without formal training in library use in general or literature searches in particular. By examining various successful and unsuccessful strategies used by…

A study was undertaken to determine which types of verbal humor are preferred by children and to discover how well adults can predict what children will perceive as humorous. Fifteen adults (education students, parents, and teachers) were asked to rate 25 jokes on a four point scale ranging from not funny at all and not very funny to kind of funny…

The study compares the content retention by students who are self-paced with content retention by students whose pacing is modified by instructors. The subjects included 148 students enrolled in an introductory college level child development course. One group of 74 students was randomly assigned to a self-paced section and another group of 74…