This report is the last in a three-part series examining the relationship between school resources and student achievement in California. The central focus in all three reports has been the standards-based reform of California public schools. Between 1995 and 1998, California introduced academic content standards specifying what students should…

The 2004/06 Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS:04/06), conducted for the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), collected information about the education and employment experiences of students in the two years following their first enrollment in postsecondary education. The primary…

Bacterial loading in water from anthropogenic sources is of common interest in both student research projects and to regulatory agencies. The presence of fecal coliform bacteria in natural waters can be the deciding indicator for how the bodies of water are classified for use. Since current tests are not specific, it is difficult to determine…

Context: Medication safety is clearly an important quality issue for rural hospitals. However, rural hospitals face special challenges implementing medication safety practices in terms of their staffing and financial and technical resources. Purpose: This study assessed the capacity of small rural hospitals to implement medication safety…

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to explore the entrepreneurship profile of Turkish university students and to make an evaluation for their entrepreneurship orientation by comparing them with non-entrepreneurially inclined students. Design/methodology/approach: In this study, six traits, namely need for achievement, locus of control, risk…

Oversampling and cluster sampling must be addressed when analyzing complex sample data. This study: (a) compares parameter estimates when applying weights versus not applying weights; (b) examines subset selection issues; (c) compares results when using standard statistical software (SPSS) versus specialized software (AM); and (d) offers…

The authors propose new procedures for evaluating direct, indirect, and total effects in multilevel models when all relevant variables are measured at Level 1 and all effects are random. Formulas are provided for the mean and variance of the indirect and total effects and for the sampling variances of the average indirect and total effects.…

To complement traditional learning activities in a masters-level research methodology course, social work students worked on a formal research project which involved: designing the study, constructing measures, selecting a sampling strategy, collecting data, reducing and analyzing data, and finally interpreting and communicating the results. The…

Although the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R) is being rapidly replaced by the third edition of the WISC, questions concerning the construct validity of the WISC-R have not yet been resolved, including the number of factors it measures and whether the same constructs fit across all age levels. This study sought to…

Despite the increasing criticism of statistical significance testing by researchers, particularly in the publication of the 1994 American Psychological Association's style manual, statistical significance test results are still popular in journal articles. For this reason, it remains important to understand the logic of inferential statistics. A…

The research process in studying narrative analysis, or story-telling, is examined, focusing on: (1) how researchers use narrative to position themselves with respect to participants in a study, (2) how researchers use conversational stories to construct and negotiate meaning, and (3) what the absence of certain stories reveals about the…

This book is intended to explain principles of qualitative research to potential researchers and to provide them with a set of tools, and guidelines for critical thinking as they carry out such research. The chapters are organized around the elements of the research process which require decisions. Following an introductory chapter, Chapter 2…

This manual has been produced to familiarize data users with the procedures followed for data collection and processing of the first follow-up dropout component of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88). Necessary documentation is also provided for use of the data files. The base-year population covered by the NELS:88 included…

A study on sampling errors of variance components was conducted within the framework of generalizability theory by P. L. Smith (1978). The study used an intuitive approach for solving the problem of how to allocate the number of conditions to different facets in order to produce the most stable estimate of the universe score variance. Optimization…

Among the different types of experimental design are two general categories: true experimental designs and quasi- experimental designs. True experimental designs include more than one purposively created group, common measured outcomes, and random assignment. Quasi-experimental designs are commonly used when random assignment is not practical or…