From the perspectives of the philosophy of science and statistical inference, we discuss the challenges of making prescriptive statements in quantitative research articles. We first consider the prescriptive nature of educational research and argue that prescriptive statements are a necessity in educational research. The logic of deduction,…

Formal English language education in Taiwan now starts at Year 3 in primary school, with an emphasis on communicative proficiency. In addition to formal education, attending English cram schools after regular school has become a common phenomenon for Taiwanese students. The main purpose of gaining additional reinforcement in English cram schools…

The study examines the impact of professional development on the topic of poverty in one high poverty school community located in a small city in southern Ontario, Canada. It considers narrative-based experiences of teachers' collaborative inquiry on literacy practices after a significant amount of professional development was provided to…

An increasing number of studies on the use of tools for automated writing evaluation (AWE) in writing classrooms suggest growing interest in their potential for formative assessment. As with all assessments, these applications should be validated in terms of their intended interpretations and uses. A recent argument-based validation framework…

The purposes of this study were to provide a game-based anti-phishing lesson to 110 elementary school students in Taiwan, explore their learning behavioral patterns, and investigate the effects of the flow states on their learning behavioral patterns and learning achievement. The study recorded behaviour logs, and applied a pre- and post-test on…

Investigations of the validity of a number of high-stakes language assessments are conducted using an argument-based approach, which requires evidence for inferences that are critical to score interpretation (Chapelle, Enright, & Jamieson, 2008b; Kane, 2013). The current study investigates the extrapolation inference for a high-stakes test of…

Each edition of the IDRA Newsletter strives to provide many different perspectives on the issues in education topics discussed and to define its significance in the state and national dialogue. This issue focuses on Using Data for Action and includes: (1) Community and School Use of Data for College Readiness and Postsecondary Success (Karmen…

Direct instruction is a proven effective method to strengthen children's ability to design unconfounded experiments using the control-of-variables strategy (CVS). Recent research suggests that task segmentation can also promote children's use of this strategy. The present study investigated this assumption by comparing the relative…

Business analytics courses, such as marketing research, data mining, forecasting, and advanced financial modeling, have substantial predictive modeling components. The predictive modeling in these courses requires students to estimate and test many linear regressions. As a result, false positive variable selection ("type I errors") is…

Studies of infant looking times over the past 50 years have provided profound insights about cognitive development, but their dependent measures and analytic techniques are quite limited. In the context of infants' attention to discrete sequential events, we show how a Bayesian data analysis approach can be combined with a rational cognitive…

Lexical inferencing is an important vocabulary learning strategy. Unfortunately, almost all research on this issue has been carried out in the reading context. This study is the first to directly measure lexical inferencing success in listening, by both native (N?=?47) and nonnative (N?=?30) speakers of English. It analysed the effects of…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there are gender differences among elementary school-aged students in regard to the inferences they generate during reading. Fourth-grade students (130 females; 126 males) completed think-aloud tasks while reading one practice and one experimental narrative text. Females generated a larger number and a…

Although combining methods is nothing new, more contributions about why and how to mix methods for validation purposes are needed. This article presents a case of validating the inferences drawn from the Participatory Evaluation Measurement Instrument, an instrument that purports to measure stakeholder participation in evaluation. Although the…

Research Findings: This study examined preschool teachers' literal talk (LT) and inferential talk (IT) during shared book readings in early childhood education (ECE) and early childhood special education (ECSE) classrooms. We aimed to characterize and compare teachers' LT and IT in these 2 classroom contexts and determine whether differences in LT…

This study investigates the impact of using an adaptive computer-assisted instruction (CAI) program in early childhood education. The Waterford Early Reading Program (ERP) is a CAI program that was assigned to kindergarten and first grade students in a school district in Texas for the 2015-2016 school year. The Texas Primary Reading Inventory…