This paper describes the development of a Quality of Care and Support (QOCS) scale for use with adult persons with physical and intellectual disabilities. In the pilot phase of the study, 12 centers from around the world carried out focus groups with people with physical and disabilities, their carers, and with professionals in order to identify…

This paper focuses on young foreign language learners' attitudes and motivations. An overview is given of the main issues in this research area, based on key European studies. Approaches to studying these affective learner characteristics are described. Some attention is devoted to data elicitation techniques and the importance of triangulation.…

In late 1939, the United States Bureau of the Census was gearing up for the 16th official enumeration, or count, of the nation's population. Authorities wanted to insure widespread participation. So, they made good use of some information revealed in the 1930 Census--namely that roughly 40 percent of American households had a radio set. In…

Improving systematic use of student data to inform the work of teachers, schools, and districts has become a hot topic in education reform. Learning Forward's Standards for Professional Learning stress better use of data, and particularly student performance data, within an integrated approach to improving practice. While better use of data by…

In New York's Port Washington Union Free School District, security and privacy for students, faculty, and staff coexist--thanks to security cameras with eyelids. In 2010, video cameras donated by New York-based SituCon Systems were installed in the main lobby at two of the district's seven schools. "We really haven't had the kind of incidents…

Despite the research conducted on school configurations, little is known about the landscape of school configurations in Indiana and about the perspectives of school leaders on school configurations and their perceived impact in education. District leaders do not have the information to make informed decisions relative to the best configuration…

Students are people--not data. Assessment data can bury you or give you focused information on how to reach every student. "Putting Faces on the Data" shows how to develop a common language for sharing all students' progress with all teachers and leaders and how to use ongoing assessment to inform instruction. Based on worldwide research from more…

In order to inquire into the persistent underrepresentation of urban minority students in the sciences, this study explored three urban African American students' conceptualizations of school science and media science, with emphases on the representation of science in "Crime Scene Investigation" ("CSI"). Based on the data…

The purpose of this study was to conduct a quantitative exploration of accreditation actions issued by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges' Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (WASC-ACCJC) since 2002, in order to examine their relationship to a dataset of common student and institutional variables. This exploration…

In this article, the authors describe an investigative activity in which their eighth-grade students reconstructed past environmental change in the New England area using data from lake varves in central Vermont to examine evidence of climate change. The investigation uses an authentic paleoclimate record (Ridge 2011) from the Pleistocene epoch,…

Confidence intervals (CIs) and effect sizes are essential to encourage meta-analytic thinking and to accumulate research findings. CIs provide a range of plausible values for population parameters with a degree of confidence that the parameter is in that particular interval. CIs also give information about how precise the estimates are. Comparison…

The accountability movement in education has caused school administrators and teachers to think differently about how they report, interpret, and use student assessment data. For example, legislative measures such as No Child Left Behind require school officials to report how all students are progressing toward established standards typically…

During the course of a 6-year behavioral safety consult at a food and drink industry site, data were collected on the number of Occupational Safety Health Administration (OSHA) recordable incidents, number of lost and restricted days, and number of peer safety observations. Employees were trained to identify safe and unsafe behavior, conduct peer…

This paper describes a study focused on promoting culturally responsive collaboration practices at an urban preK-8 Catholic school. Using participatory action research (PAR) as its framework, a team of school stakeholders and university faculty and students from the psychology department partnered to create a participant-driven data collection and…

Purpose: The main purpose of this study is to determine the cigarette smoking rate and smoking cessation counseling frequency in a sample of Chinese nurses. Design/methodology/approach: At the time of data collection, the hospital had 260 nurses, 255 females and five males. The 200 nurses working on the two daytime shifts were given the…