Previous research presented in this journal and elsewhere has suggested that vocational education is highly gender segregated and it is the heavy industrial sectors such as industry, vehicle and construction programmes that mainly attract boys with an anti-school attitude who are not interested in academic school work. However, there are good…

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) can be at risk of bias. Using data from a RCT, we considered the impact of post-randomisation bias. We compared the trial primary outcome, which was administered blindly, with the secondary outcome, which was not administered blindly. From 44 schools, 522 children were randomised to receive a one-to-one maths…

Language teachers of the future, our current students, live in an increasingly technology-rich world. However, language students do not necessarily see their own digital practices as having relevance for guiding language learning. Research in the fields of CALL and language education more generally indicates that teaching practices change slowly…

This meeting summary is organized into two major sections. The first section captures the individual contribution of meeting participants, including both Institute of Education Sciences (IES) staff and the invited technical working group members. The second section captures themes that arose during the group discussions, which were organized…

Determining how learners use MOOCs effectively is critical to providing feedback to instructors, schools, and policy-makers on this highly scalable technology. However, drawing inferences about student learning outcomes in MOOCs has proven to be quite difficult due to large amounts of missing data (of various kinds) and to the diverse population…

In this commentary, the authors discuss the topic of ostracism--being ignored and excluded--as a painful social phenomenon that most individuals have experienced at least once in their lives, and sometimes daily. The harmful power of ostracism is not short-lived; data suggest that participants asked to relive ostracism by writing an…

Psychologists studying problem solving have, for over 100 years, been interested in the question of whether there are two different modes of solving problems. One mode--problem solving based on analysis--depends on application of past experience to the problem at hand and proceeds incrementally toward solution. The second mode--problem solving…

Background: Methods need to be further developed to include non-randomised studies (NRS) in systematic reviews of the effects of health care interventions. NRS are often required to answer questions about harms and interventions for which evidence from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) is not available. Methods used to review randomised…

The use of meta-analysis in medicine and epidemiology really took off in the 1970s. However, in high-energy physics, the Particle Data Group has been carrying out meta-analyses of measurements of particle masses and other properties since 1957. Curiously, there has been virtually no interaction between those working inside and outside particle…

The current paper describes and illustrates a Bayesian approach to the meta-analysis of coefficient alpha. Alpha is the most commonly used estimate of the reliability or consistency (freedom from measurement error) for educational and psychological measures. The conventional approach to meta-analysis uses inverse variance weights to combine…

Few would doubt that ETS researchers have contributed more to the general topic of item response theory (IRT) than individuals from any other institution. In this report, we briefly review most of those contributions, dividing them into sections by decades of publication, beginning with early work by Fred Lord and Bert Green in the 1950s and…

In this article we examine two methodological façades of clarity that commonly shroud critical qualitative educational inquiry. More specifically, we interrogate discussions of reflexivity and positionality and explore the ways in which methodology curricula and instructional practices perpetuate façades of clarity, or a false sense of coherence,…

What counts as "evidence" is a question that has been explored in many arenas, but it has been a particular focus of debate in the health sector, where the notion of systematically appraising data about the effectiveness of interventions in order to inform everyday practice was first promulgated. In its original form,…

This chapter specifically addresses how exemplar methods are especially relevant to examining cultural and contextual issues. Cross-cultural, cultural, and indigenous psychologies are discussed in order to highlight how studying actual exemplars in their unique and complex developmental contexts has the potential to identify themes that either…

This review study examines the current research literature in distance education for the years 2005 to 2012. The author found 382 research articles published during that time in four prominent peer-reviewed research journals. The articles were classified and coded as quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods. Further analysis found another…