As a tour de force, data mining is likely to gain wider use in the next few years. To facilitate this transition, we make several recommendations addressed to both institutional research professionals and the Association of Institutional Research.

This chapter compares the racial and ethnic diversity among faculty and academic leaders with that of the student population in two-year colleges. Using two national data sets, this study reveals that African American and Hispanic faculty and academic leaders remain underrepresented compared to the number of students of color attending the…

Data that is meaningful and purposeful is collected to assess the state of our library media programs, services and policies. The way in which one can develop the skills required to collect, analyze, interpret, present, and use data is presented.

The authors captured mother-child and father-child relationships when children were 7 and 15 months old by coding 4 explicitly dyadic components of mutually responsive orientation (MRO): coordinated routines, harmonious communication, mutual cooperation, and emotional ambiance. These components were coded in 102 families in naturalistic contexts…

The likelihood ratio test statistic G[squared](dif) is widely used for comparing the fit of nested models in categorical data analysis. In large samples, this statistic is distributed as a chi-square with degrees of freedom equal to the difference in degrees of freedom between the tested models, but only if the least restrictive model is correctly…

This qualitative study explored 4 counselor education doctoral students' 1st-semester experience. Data analysis revealed students experienced vicissitudes of thought and emotion that varied from self-doubt to beliefs in their abilities, received information and made decisions about how to engage in their responsibilities, and felt affirmation of…

A model with fixed relations between manifest and latent variables is presented for investigating choice reaction time data. The numbers for fixation originate from the polynomial function. Two options are considered: the component-based (1 latent variable for each component of the polynomial function) and composite-based options (1 latent…

The current study investigates school-level factors that affect the performance of students with disabilities on statewide assessments. Data were collected as part of a larger study examining the effects of education policy reform on students with disabilities. Statewide assessment data for students with disabilities from 2 school districts within…

In a climate of growing accountability for Higher Education, there is an increased demand on assessment to play an evaluative role. National, professional and institutional quality assurance systems expect that the assessment of student performance can be used to evaluate the quality of teachers, learners, programmes and even institutions for the…

This paper raises some methodological concerns about the conduct, analysis and interpretation of results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. While in many respects PISA represents an advance on previous attempts at international comparative assessment studies, it retains certain problematic aspects. The article…

"Library Quarterly's" seventy-fifth anniversary invites an analysis of the journal's bibliometric dimension, including contributor attributes, various author rankings, and citation impact. Eugene Garfield's HistCite software, linked to Thomson Scientific's Web of Science, as made available by Garfield, for the period 1956-2004, was used as the…

This paper presents a meta-analysis of theory and research about writing and writing pedagogy, identifying six discourses--configurations of beliefs and practices in relation to the teaching of writing. It introduces and explains a framework for the analysis of educational data about writing pedagogy in which the connections are drawn across views…

In this article, we report on our qualitative study involving eight individuals hired to transcribe research tapes in university contexts. We consider issues of data analysis and data trustworthiness and the implications for both when transcription is assigned to someone other than the researcher. We explore the challenges transcribers faced…

In this article, we present secondary students' perceptions of their writing and writing instruction. Using the NCTE/IRA Standards as the foundation for a survey, we questioned nearly 2,000 public-school students concerning what they wrote, how they wrote, and the extent to which they wrote in their language arts classes. We chose Florida as our…

There are two main theories with respect to the development of spelling ability: the stage model and the model of overlapping waves. In this paper exploratory model based clustering will be used to analyze the responses of more than 3500 pupils to subsets of 245 items. To evaluate the two theories, the resulting clusters will be ordered along a…