The research project assignment can create meaningful opportunities for students to apply sociological concepts. For grading these projects, assessment rubrics are useful pedagogical tools to evaluate students' abilities in achieving course learning objectives. In this study, I analyzed final research papers collected over multiple semesters in my…

The aim of the 15 collaborative projects conducted during the new funding phase of the German research program Modeling and Measuring Competencies in Higher Education--Validation and Methodological Innovations (KoKoHs) is to make a significant contribution to advancing the field of modeling and valid measurement of competencies acquired in higher…

Given that science and science education are undergoing a climate change, the author suggests a re-envisioning of undergraduate research assessment. He argues that continuation of research into the processes and benefits of undergraduate research opportunities for undergraduates will need to decrease focus on student dispositions and increase…

Research on engineering practice is scarce and sharing of qualitative research data can reduce the effort required for an aspiring researcher to obtain enough data from engineering workplaces to draw generalizable conclusions, both qualitative and quantitative. This paper describes how a large shareable qualitative data set on engineering…

The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed description of the Monitoring the Future research design, including sampling design, data collection procedures, measurement content, and questionnaire format. This study assesses the changing lifestyles, values, and preferences of American youth on a continuing basis. Each year since 1975, at…

As part of a research project to evaluate the effects of sand and gravel mining on water quality, students were trained to analyze their own drinking water for simple quality indicators. Indicators analyzed were pH, conductivity, hardness, nitrate, chloride, and dissolved iron. Approximately 523 analyses were completed by students between 2006 and…

School communities find themselves within an overall ideological and epistemological controversy with regard to a drive for goal-oriented and "evidence-based" practices on the one hand and emancipative bottom-up developmental strategies on the other, treating empirical data as information to be analysed according to context, with…

Introduction: Members of the millennial generation (born after 1982) have come of age in a society infused with technology and information. It is unclear how they determine the validity of information gathered, or whether or not validity is even a concern. Previous information search models based on mediated searches with different age groups may…

As digital technologies are expanding the power and reach of research, they are also raising complex issues. These include complications in ensuring the validity of research data; standards that do not keep pace with the high rate of innovation; restrictions on data sharing that reduce the ability of researchers to verify results and build on…

We investigated barriers to and facilitators of effective teacher-child interactions in voluntary pre-kindergarten programs in child care settings. An effective teacher-child interaction enables both teachers and children to actively engage in solving the problems they confront in their daily lives. The effective teacher-child interaction relies…

The Education Trust research report "Stuck Schools" suggests a framework for identifying chronically low-performing schools in need of turnaround. The study uses Maryland and Indiana to show that some low-performing schools make progress while others remain stagnant. The report has four serious problems of reliability and validity,…

This highly readable text demystifies the qualitative research process--and helps readers conceptualize their own studies--by organizing the different research paradigms and traditions into coherent clusters. Real-world examples and firsthand perspectives illustrate the research process; instructive exercises and activities build on each other so…

Data on sexual preferences of 243 male homosexuals were analyzed to determine how they fit the insertee-inserter dichotomy. The fit between the dichotomy and the data was very poor. The most popular set of sexual preferences was for all roles combined, both active and passive, anal and oral. (Author)

Yalom's Q-sort questionnaire was administered to 13 groups and then item analized. Factor analysis identified seven major "curative" factors. Analysis of variance and correlation techniques showed that part of the variation in curative factor perception is related to characteristics of groups and/or their participants. (SE)

This study investigates how closely different interviewers agree when ranking the same applicants, and determines the "correctness" of their rating of applicants. Interview data for applicants to a medical school for two recent consecutive years were examined. For the first year, 573 applicants were interviewed; for the second year, 675 were…