Assessment has long been beset by a dichotomy between what Lynch (2003: 4) termed the positivist and interpretivist orientations. The former views assessment as a technical exercise involving the quantification of learners' knowledge or cognitive abilities; the latter considers assessment as the humanistic endeavor of portraying learners'…

Goal attainment scaling (GAS) has been considered to be one of the most versatile and appealing evaluation protocols available for human services. Aspects of the protocol that make the method so appealing to practitioners--that is, collaboratively working with individual clients to identify and assign weights to goals they will work to…

In this paper, the authors introduce the "Targeted Assessment Rubric for Interdisciplinary Writing," an empirically-tested instrument designed to assess interdisciplinary writing at the collegiate level. Interdisciplinary writing presents unique challenges to students, calling upon them to mediate the rhetorical, theoretical, and…

This article reviews recent evaluation studies of online learning communities to provide a systematic understanding of how such communities are evaluated. Forty-two representative studies were selected and categorized into a newly developed taxonomy of online learning community evaluations. This taxonomy is divided into four components: evaluation…

The ability to differentiate possible events from impossible ones is an invaluable skill when reasoning about claims that transcend the perceptual evidence at hand, yet preschool-aged children do not readily make this differentiation when reasoning about physically extraordinary events [Shtulman, A., & Carey, S. (2007). "Improbable or impossible?…

Access to scholarly information in the disciplines of education and medicine occurred primarily through the simultaneous development of two bibliographic databases. The Education Resource Information Center (ERIC) originated as a resource designed to be comprehensive in its inclusion of peer-reviewed and unpublished literature for the entire…

Families of children with disabilities have been the subject of a number of myths, some of which have been introduced and promulgated by researchers influenced by cultural norms that may incline them to ask questions in particular ways and which may result in the institutionalization of ideas and methods, rather than subjecting established beliefs…

Partial Order Theory has been recently more and more employed in applied science to overcome the intrinsic disadvantage hidden in aggregation, if a multiple attribute system is available. Despite its numerous positive features, there are many practical cases where the interpretation of the partial order can be rather troublesome. In these cases…

Many studies have claimed that hemispheric processing is split precisely at the foveal midline and so place great emphasis on the precise location at which words are fixated. These claims are based on experiments in which a variety of fixation procedures were used to ensure fixation accuracy but the effectiveness of these procedures is unclear. We…

Purpose: Theories of organizational learning and sustainability must be able to respond to contemporary social issues and accommodate, in some way, the multiplicity of perspectives that are present in society on these topics. One way of developing multi-perspectival capacities in the scientific understandings is through the building of metatheory.…

To make valid decisions about intervention effectiveness in a tiered intervention system, it is essential to formatively assess treatment integrity along with student outcomes. Despite significant advances in technologies for ongoing assessment of student outcomes, research regarding treatment integrity assessment has not shared the same progress…

While participatory evaluation (PE) constitutes an important trend in the field of evaluation, its ontology has not been systematically analyzed. As a result, the concept of PE is ambiguous and inadequately theorized. Furthermore, no existing instrument accurately measures stakeholder participation. First, this article attempts to overcome these…

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to determine if a semi-occluded vocal tract could be used to measure phonation threshold pressure. This is in contrast to the shutter technique, where an alternation between a fully occluded tract and an unoccluded tract is used. Method: Five male and 5 female volunteers phonated through a thin straw held…

Traditional assessment methods such as tests and essays may not be adequate to evaluate students' ability to solve problems and think critically. I developed a qualitative assessment technique for a junior-level Wildlife Management Techniques course that incorporated written responses in a pre- and post-course reflection exercise. I provided the…

Sampling has been the single most influential component of conducting research with lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) populations. Poor sampling designs can result in biased results that will mislead other researchers, policymakers, and practitioners. Investigators wishing to study LGB populations must therefore devote significant energy and…