African American women utilize the community college environments as an avenue to attain an education and eventually pursue career and educational goals while remaining in their own communities. However, not much is known about the unique perceptions and experiences of African American women impacting their enrollment and persistence at rural…

This study explores single Chinese international female doctoral students' cultural transition experiences. Instead of only focusing on their academic lives, this study focuses on the completeness and integrity of these women's lives in aspects of academics, social relationships, marriage expectations, and religious environments. Nine participants…

In this report, AIR shares key findings about postsecondary enrollment decision-making experiences of adult learners of color. This report serves as our main study report, encompassing the range of topics we explored; an important goal of this project was to shed light on new issues or ideas, including those that might spark experimentation with…

The main objective of the qualitative comparative analysis is to find solutions that display sufficient configurations of causal conditions leading to the presence of an outcome. These solutions should be less complex than the original observed configurations, as parsimonious as possible, without sacrificing the sufficiency requirement.…

I argue that what-makes-it-possible questions are a distinct and important kind of sociological research question. What is social phenomenon "P" made possible or enabled by? Results won't be about "P's" causes and causal relationships, but about its enablers and enabling relationships. I examine the character of…

Existing theories and frameworks generally have regarded creativity as inhering in a person, a task, a situation, or a combination of 2 of these 3 elements. After reviewing these approaches, and frameworks that are based on the interaction of more than 2 components, we propose a Person × Task × Situation synergistic paradigm, according to which…

This book critically analyses how cultural and educational policies construct creativity through a range of concepts and compares this against the open and expansive idea of creativity as experienced by individuals in society more broadly. The book draws on empirical data, case-study examples, and ethnographic motifs to identify the discursive…

Children who like to read and write tend to be better at it. This association is typically interpreted as enjoyment impacting engagement in literacy activities, which boosts literacy skills. We fitted direction-of-causation models to partial data of 3690 Finnish twins aged 12. Literacy skills were rated by the twins' teachers and literacy…

In this article, we systematize the factors influencing performance and feasibility of automatic content scoring methods for short text responses. We argue that performance (i.e., how well an automatic system agrees with human judgments) mainly depends on the linguistic variance seen in the responses and that this variance is indirectly influenced…

The manuscript describes an experimental investigation of a technique that might reduce memory conformity: the reinforced self-affirmation procedure (RSA). While previous studies have already demonstrated the RSA's effectiveness in reducing other memory distortions (e.g., the misinformation effect and interrogative suggestibility), this has not…

Food (systems, cultures, and practices of eating) is a significant site of cultural, political, and identity formation to which religious educators can pay attention, not only in a critical sense--to be "readers" of culture--but also as a potential path of creative engagement and re-formation--a way to become "cultural…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to outline how far the empirical evidence supports the centrality of leadership in the process of improving underperforming schools. Design/methodology/approach: This article draws on evidence from a contemporary, selected, review of the literature. Findings: The findings show that leadership is the critical…

Why are some people more willing than others to take risks? While behavioral tasks (e.g., monetary lotteries) are often regarded as a gold standard for capturing a person's risk preference, recent studies have found stated preferences (e.g., responses to hypothetical scenarios) to exhibit higher reliability, convergent validity, and test-retest…

Tennessee passed voucher-style Education Savings Account (ESA) legislation in 2019. We analyze the roll call vote in the Tennessee House to better understand the role of constituent, legislator, and special interest influences on support for school choice. This is accomplished using a binary probit model with legislator vote as the dependent…

Site visits are common in evaluation plans but there is a dearth of guidance about how to conduct them. This paper revisits site visit standards published by Michael Patton in 2017 and proposes a framework for evaluative site visits. We retrospectively examined documents from a series of site visits for examples of Patton's standards. Through this…