It is widely recognized today that a teacher's surrounding professional community inevitably affects the kind of teaching that students are offered. However, until recently, it has been difficult to quantify and systematically study the nature of professional relationships in schools and districts. The articles in this special issue provide a…

Social dominance orientation (SDO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and socially desirable responding were examined among a sample of self-identified supporters of gifted education (N = 341), 70% of whom had an official role in gifted education as researchers, teachers, or gifted-talented (G/T) trainers. The sample was primarily female, White,…

Research has identified several anxiety and fear constructs that contribute directly or indirectly to the chronic course of pain. One way to gain insight into the frequently observed interrelations between these constructs may be by conceptualizing them within a hierarchical structure. In this structure, general and specific constructs are…

This article presents an exploratory study aimed at the identification of students' levels of understanding in spherical geometry as van Hiele did for Euclidean geometry. To do this, we developed and implemented a spherical geometry course for student mathematics teachers. Six structured, "task-based interviews" were held with eight student…

This article examines whether centrally developed initiatives at the state level have an impact on how districts in the U.S. think about their role in providing direction and support for student learning, and also examines how districts view the strategies that state governments use to initiate change at the local level. Our focus is on smaller…

This paper discusses the details of the curricular development effort with a focus on the vertical and horizontal integration of laboratory curricula and course projects within the Electronic Engineering Technology (EET) program at Texas A&M University. Both software and hardware aspects are addressed. A common set of software tools are…

Purpose: The aim of this article is to examine whether the boundary between the separate worlds of evaluation and frontline work in a hospital can be overcome. The study provides an example of a rare, innovative creation process of an assessment tool in which the tool users and the tool producer participated. The article aims to widen the…

Purpose: This paper aims to analyse and evaluate the transfer process of codified knowledge (CK) performed under two different approaches: the "socio-technical" and the "top-down". It is argued that the socio-technical approach supports the transfer of CK better than the top-down approach. Design/methodology/approach: Case study methodology was…

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very reliably observed in the data, but to date it escaped satisfactory theoretical explanation. This article suggests that Zipf's law may result from a hierarchical organization…

In this article, the author clarifies why his use of the term "my teachers" in a lunch meeting--a term that is open to interpretation and one that principals should use with great care--had given him a nagging feeling. When a student says "my teacher," there is a clear meaning. The student is literally referring to his or her teacher, usually with…

During the 1980s and 1990s, administrative decentralization was a prominent reform theme in public education. Revisiting those efforts today reveals a conceptual landscape often governed by ad hoc theorizing, untested assumptions, and an overall lack of consistency and coherence. It provides an example of how terminological ambiguity on the part…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the demographic variables of tenure and functional track have a moderating effect on the strategic leadership of school leaders. Design/methodology/approach: Using a conceptual framework developed by the researcher, a static/cross-sectional questionnaire-based study on a convenience…

This paper focuses on formative assessment in the field of higher education. It examines Bernstein's work on vertical discourses and knowledge structures with the view to deepening understanding of the concept of assessment "for" learning. The first part of the paper draws on Vygotsky's work on concept development and Bernstein's work on…

This paper provides a means of quickly ascertaining the relative health of smaller academic libraries by presenting a top ten list of vitality indicators. The list is based on an observational convenience sampling of thirty smaller academic libraries across the United States. The indicators making the list were those which appeared most often in…

Experiments that involve nested structures may assign treatment conditions either to subgroups (such as classrooms) or individuals within subgroups (such as students). The design of such experiments requires knowledge of the intraclass correlation structure to compute the sample sizes necessary to achieve adequate power to detect the treatment…