Involvement in student affairs professional development was investigated using McClusky's (1963) Power Load Margin (PLM) theory from the adult education field. The PLM theory is a framework for identifying sources of stress (load) and power in one's life; the amount of power available to handle stress is called margin in life (MIL). This study…

Current business and educational environments are mandating the identification, building, and assessment of specific critical competencies for the workforce. However, traditional approaches to competency analysis are often slow, expensive, and backward looking. This article presents several new computer-aided approaches to competency analysis and…

Guided by the social network perspective, this study examined the structural properties of the state reading policy domain using network visualization tools: sociograms and multidimensional scaling scattergrams. The authors' graphic exploration of eight state reading policy networks produced rich insights about the density and the overall…

The paper reports a small-scale, long-term pilot project designed to foster strategic and reasoning abilities in young primary school pupils by engaging them in a number of computer games, mainly those usually called mind games (brainteasers, puzzlers, etc.). In this paper, the objectives, work methodology, experimental setting, and tools used in…

Background: The Thinking Styles Inventory--developed by Sternberg and Wagner based on Sternberg's (1988, 1997) earlier theory of mental self-government--was selected for the research in order to assess thinking styles of student teachers. Another reason is that the theoretical constructs, as well as the inventory generated from the theory, have…

Background/Context: Culturally authoritative texts such as Text Revision of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual-IV [DSM-IV-TR](American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2004) describe literate impossibility for individuals with disability labels associated with severe developmental disabilities. Our qualitative research challenges the…

Undergraduate students (N = 47), enrolled in 2 separate psychology research methods classes, evaluated a power analysis lab demonstration and homework assignment. Students attended 1 of 2 lectures that included a basic introduction to power analysis and sample size analysis. One lecture included a demonstration of how to use a computer-based power…

Demographic change in industrial countries will influence educational spending in potentially two ways. On the one hand, the decline in the number of school-age children should alleviate the financial pressure. On the other hand, the theoretical/empirical literature has established that the concomitantly increasing proportion of elderly in the…

While peer observation of teaching is regarded as an important part of a faculty member's promotion and tenure portfolio, little has been reported on its usefulness. Results from this study indicate that both observers and observees value the peer observation process, are neutral about the adequacy of observer training, use a variety of…

Increasingly, government, foundations, and others are asking community-based organizations for more evaluation information. Although the demand for this information may be increasing, the field knows very little about the way organizations are responding to this demand. Using data collected from interviews and a mail survey of community-based…

This paper reviews methods for conducting and reporting teacher research. Through three cases, the paper explores common and diverse methods employed in classroom inquiry. The paper recounts the history of teacher research and discusses common methodological characteristics as well as context-specific features of teacher research. The first case…

Most studies of mail survey methodology focus on specific design elements, but several major reviews of research have attempted to synthesize the findings of independent empirical studies. This study examined the review articles for what they have to say about factors influencing response rates and for their methodology. A literature review…

A large number of pairwise multiple comparisons (P-MCPs) have been introduced recently to the educational research community. The use of these P-MCPs with single group repeated measures data was studied through an exploratory Monte Carlo study of P-MCPs that have been shown to control different types of Type 2 error and Type 1 familywise error…

The designing of tests has been a source of concern for test developers over the past decade. Various kinds of test forms have been applied. Among these are the fixed-form test, the adaptive test, and the testlet. Each of these forms has its own design. In this paper, the construction of test forms is placed within the general framework of optimal…

During 1973-75, the Rand Corporation conducted a study of federally funded change agent programs to determine the factors for successful change in the schools at the local, state, and federal levels. The programs included the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Title III, Innovation Projects; ESEA Title VII, Bilingual Projects;…