College-preference studies can help administrators identify a potential pool of desirable students and implement new recruitment techniques. This study, which supports earlier findings, used a logistic regression model to investigate the effects of variables relating student characteristics and institutional factors on the decision to apply to a…

Discusses the theory of microeconomic efficiency measurement, including frontier efficiency-measurement techniques; reviews the research measuring inefficiency in education; discusses the determinants of educational efficiency; includes table listing author, methodology, inputs and output, analytical techniques, and main findings for 28 studies of…

This article addresses the use of Model-Eliciting Activities (MEAs) as a (curricular) tool to develop mathematical creativity and identify students who are creatively gifted in mathematics. The thesis of this article is that by using MEAs, gifted educators can: (a) provide students with opportunities to develop creative and applied mathematical…

Emphasis on problem solving and mathematical modeling has gained considerable attention in the last few years. Connecting mathematics to other subjects and to the real world outside the classroom has received increased attention in mathematics programs. This article describes an application of simple differential equations in the field of…

Multi-indicator growth models were formulated as special three-level hierarchical generalized linear models to analyze growth of a trait latent variable measured by ordinal items. Items are nested within a time-point, and time-points are nested within subject. These models are special because they include factor analytic structure. This model can…

Many mathematics departments usually teach a variety of courses for students from different science departments and even from different faculties. These "service" courses are usually taught in the same way as the courses for mathematics major students. However, in science, because of the need to better analyse and interpret experimental…

An interesting and effective way to showcase the wide variety of fields to which differential equations can be applied is to have students give short oral presentations on a specific application. These talks, which have been presented by 30-40 students per year in our differential equations classes, provide exposure to a diverse array of topics…

In three studies, we investigated to what extent a geometrical representation in a psychological space succeeds in predicting typicality in animal, natural food and artifact concepts and whether contrast categories contribute to the prediction. In Study 1, we compared the predictive value of a family resemblance-based prototype model with a…

Simultaneous renewal in teacher education is based on the notion that improvement at 1 level requires improvement at all levels and that all stakeholders are responsible for such improvement. The authors discuss the creation and impact of a mathematics team as a vehicle for simultaneous renewal by using the team model for simultaneous renewal for…

This article illustrates how four teacher educators in training were challenged with respect to their epistemology and perceptions of teaching and learning mathematics through their interactions with expressive digital media during a professional development course. The research focused on their experience of communally constructing artifacts and…

People can use a variety of different strategies to perform tasks and these strategies all have two characteristics in common. First, they can be evaluated in comparison with either an absolute or a relative standard. Second, they can be used at varying levels of consistency. In the present article, the authors develop a general theory of task…

The Common Knowledge: Pittsburgh (CK:P), a technology-based project, introduced the Internet into all levels of the Pittsburgh Public Schools during 1993-97. This is a case study of the ideology, strategies, and process of the CK:P project describes the project's activities, examines the project in light of school-reform literature, and uses its…

A closed form approximation is given for the variance of examinee proficiency estimates in the Rasch model for dichotomous items, under the condition that only estimates, rather than true values, of item difficulty parameters are available. The term that must be added to the usual response-sampling variance is inversely proportional to both the…

Induced probabilities have been largely ignored by educational researchers. Simply stated, if a new or random variable is defined in terms of a first random variable, then induced probability is the probability or density of the new random variable that can be found by summation or integration over the appropriate domains of the original random…

An overview is given of the available statistical theory and software for analyzing hierarchically nested data. Programs are evaluated, and general techniques are proposed to analyze data from several domains. This research is part of a larger project to evaluate elementary education in the Netherlands. The models discussed are the random…