Test input has often been taken as a given in test design practice. Nearly all guides for test designers provide extensive coverage of how to design test items but pay little attention to test input. This paper presents the case that test input plays a crucial role in designing tests of soft skills that have rarely been assessed in existing tests.…

This document reports data from the 2015 School Crime Supplement (SCS) to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The Web Tables show the extent to which students with different personal characteristics report being bullied. Estimates include responses by student characteristics: student sex, race/ethnicity, grade, and household income.…

This report presents tabulations for the 2012 Academic Libraries Survey (ALS) conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), within the Institute of Education Sciences. The 2012 ALS population included postsecondary institutions with all of the following: total library expenditures that exceed…

As the use of online courses in high schools increases rapidly across the United States, schools are using courses from a multitude of sources to achieve a variety of educational goals. Policies and practices for monitoring student progress and success in online courses are also diverse. Yet few states formally track or report student…

This Distance Learning Fiscal and Statistical Report is an annual publication designed to document statistical and financial aspects of the Distance Learning Program at West Valley College (Saratoga, California). In addition to presenting comparative distance learning course statistics for the last 15 years, this report presents a thorough review…

Describes a study that analyzed 14 electronic lists or newsgroups in library and information science to find out which topics of discussion are dominant and which functions are performed by the messages posted. It also introduced students to this type of professional communication and to content analysis as a research method. Contains 51…

This study examined the use of online argumentation scaffolds to engage and support coherent argumentation. Participants were students in an undergraduate economics course. Results showed that providing a constraint-based argumentation scaffold during group problem-solving activities increased the generation of coherent arguments and resulted in…

Describes an electronic distance collaboration ("collaborative effort done over distance, using computer networks such as the Internet") via electronic mail between students at three universities. Topics include how success in electronic distance collaboration should be defined, what factors are related to success, and the importance of social…

Examines instructor perceptions regarding issues of civility in online instructional communication. A survey containing fixed-choice statements was completed by 32 instructors at Northern Arizona University. Summary descriptive statistics were computed for each fixed-choice survey item. Six tables and four figures present results. The survey is…

Presents a content analysis of PUBYAC, an electronic discussion list for Children and Young Adult Services in Public Libraries. Information is provided on the different themes and topics that appear in the list, the lifespan and liveliness of specific discussions, percentage of active participants, and distribution of messages by participant. (AEF)

Describes a study that established a measure and model for use in predicting and explaining electronic mail systems as an example of computer-mediated communication technologies usage and choice. The results indicated that all of the eight hypotheses showed significant correlation between criterion and predictor variates, supported by different…

Examines mobile agent coordination and presents TuCSoN, a coordination model for Internet applications based on mobile information agents that uses a tuple centre, a tuple space enhanced with the capability of programming its behavior in response to communication events. Discusses the effectiveness of the TuCSoN model in the contexts of Internet…

Based on survey data from college and university distance learning programs in the United States and Canada, this report gives higher education administrators hard data to make decisions on the financing, scope, and development of distance learning efforts. It also profiles some of the leading practitioners such as Johns Hopkins, California State…

Nine volunteers from a 17-member physics method class in a preservice teacher education program at Queen's University of Kingston (Canada) participated in a private WebCT forum in which they could explore various aspects of their learning during the second half of their program. This paper responds to two central questions from this use of WebCT…

With respect to the design of cooperative systems, issues related to the fundamental communication channels, sociotechnical factors, and task characteristics associated with collaborative work situations are reviewed. Research strategies incorporating theory-motivated design, ethnographic methods, and controlled testing methods are discussed as a…