This study explores the relationship between exposure to pseudoscientific television (TV) programmes and pseudoscientific beliefs among Taiwanese university students. The "scale of attitude toward pseudoscience" instrument was used to measure the attitudes of 380 Taiwanese university students who served as subjects for the study. The…

World university rankings (WUR) use the weight-and-sum approach to arrive at an overall measure which is then used to rank the participating universities of the world. Although the weight-and-sum procedure seems straightforward and accords with common sense, it has hidden methodological or statistical problems which render the meaning of the…

Although microcredit is considered the main vehicle for increasing the income of the poor and alleviating poverty in Bangladesh, it is now well recognised that more than this is needed to reach the ultra poor in rural areas. Consequently, almost half of the Bangladesh population is in some way linked to non-governmental organizations' development…

This study was inspired by Qian (1999) and Staehr (2009) and researched 88 Chinese learners who had already passed the College English Test 4 (CET). These learners volunteered to participate in the study regarding the depth and breadth of vocabulary knowledge and its relationship with listening comprehension, which was assessed by analyzing the…

The Student Engagement Instrument (SEI) is a self-report measure of cognitive and affective engagement with school. Prior SEI validation studies have focused primarily on construct validity through analyses of internal consistency, factor analysis, and measurement invariance. Results are presented here from a two-pronged study of the criterion…

This article examines a technique for engaging critical thinking on multiple-choice exams. University students were encouraged to "challenge" the validity of any exam question they believed to be unfair (e.g., more than one equally correct answer, ambiguous wording, etc.). The number of valid challenges a student wrote was a better…

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the socioeconomic status (SES) school segregation in Chile, whose educational system is regarded as an extreme case of a market-oriented education. The study estimated the magnitude and evolution of the SES segregation of schools at both national and local levels, and it studied the relationship between…

It was hypothesized that prosodic reading facilitates beginning readers' comprehension by allowing them to segment the text into meaningful word groups. Two prosodic features of the oral reading of second-grade students were considered: lack of inappropriate pauses and attention to punctuation. To examine the unique contribution of these features…

This study investigated self efficacy and some demographic variables as predictors of occupational stress among primary school teachers in Delta State. Three hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The study adopted a descriptive survey design that utilized an expost-facto research type. A sample of one hundred and twenty primary school…

The purpose of this study was to compare transformational and instructional leadership theories, examine the unique impact that school leaders have on student achievement, and determine which specific leadership practices are associated with increased student achievement. The sample for this study consisted of 590 teachers in 37 elementary schools…

Personality affects relationships. During the doctoral education, the second most important factor in degree completion, after financial support, is the student-advisor relationship. Approximately half of doctoral students do not finish their degrees. While it is known mentors have a profound impact on the success of doctoral students, the effect…

The role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in higher education has increased in recent years, and most university administrators consider ICT important in effective teaching practices. While administrators encourage the use of ICT, many teachers do not use technology. Most studies regarding ICT have been concerned with the…

One of the primary obstacles facing education researchers today is the struggle to obtain student-level data from states, districts, and schools. Researchers typically face one of two scenarios; they must either (1) work with contractors hired by the state or district to handle data requests who can be prohibitively expensive or (2) invest…

Recent simulation research has demonstrated that using simple raw score to operationalize a latent construct can result in inflated Type I error rates for the interaction term of a moderated statistical model when the interaction (or lack thereof) is proposed at the latent variable level. Rescaling the scores using an appropriate item response…

This study investigates the relationship between coaching expertise, project difficulty, and team empowerment on team learning outcomes within the context of a high-performance work team. Variables were tested using multiple regression analysis. The data were analyzed for two groups--team leaders and team members--using t-tests, factor analysis,…