This monograph critically examines the emerging discourse on quality associated with Education for All (EFA). It contends that EFA discourse has moved from a welcome and vital commitment to quality to its measurement without adequate consideration of what "quality" entails, particularly in the vital domain of pedagogy. Meanwhile, the…

A major challenge for researchers and educators has been to discern the effect of ICT use on student learning outcomes. This paper maps the achievements in Year 10 Science of two cohorts of students over two years where students in the first year studied in a traditional environment while students in the second took part in a blended or e-learning…

This is the first book to bring into focus the full scope of professional practice in educational leadership. This book probes the limitations of traditional research in fully comprehending the true nature of leadership, and points out how future research must be expanded to deal with understanding the complexity of educational leadership…

The impetus to broaden the scope of research education is not new. Since the 1970s, concern has been expressed about the suitability of research education as preparation for a research career outside academe. Universities have been criticized for producing over-specialized research graduates, who struggle to apply their expertise to new workplace…

This chapter serves as a guide for quantitative researchers who seek to approach their research questions critically.

Our system of research self-regulation, designed to provide internal checks and balances for those who participate in research involving human subjects, is under considerable stress. Much of this crisis has been caused by what we call mission creep, in which the workload of IRBs has expanded beyond their ability to handle effectively. Mission…

Several recent national reports have noted that there is a 20-year gap between knowledge generated from our best clinical research and the utilization of that knowledge in our health and mental health care sectors. One solution to this dilemma has been the emergence of translational science. Translational science has become a top priority of the…

In their article, "Disconfirmation of the Predictive Validity of the Self-Appraisal Questionnaire in a Sample of High-Risk Drug Offenders," criminologists Mitchell and MacKenzie (2006) purported to evaluate psychometric properties of the Self-Appraisal Questionnaire (SAQ), the first self-report risk/need measure estimating violent and nonviolent…

Classical methods for detecting outliers deal with continuous variables. These methods are not readily applicable to categorical data, such as incorrect/correct scores (0/1) and ordered rating scale scores (e.g., 0,..., 4) typical of multi-item tests and questionnaires. This study proposes two definitions of outlier scores suited for categorical…

Research within a constructivist approach often relies on interview data, which are used to reveal beliefs held by the interviewee or to expose conceptions or conceptual structures that are supposed to reside within the interviewee. From a sociocultural perspective, severe criticism has been leveled against the neglect of the problems of inferring…

There is significant potential for error in long production processes that consist of sequential stages, each of which is heavily dependent on the previous stage, such as the SER (Scoring, Equating, and Reporting) process. Quality control procedures are required in order to monitor this process and to reduce the number of mistakes to a minimum. In…

Research on facilitated communication (FC) is discussed, along with flaws in previous validation studies and suggestions for improving validation studies, including: testing first whether the person can do the task required under quiet, relaxed conditions; allowing the person to practice the skill until it can be used during the validation test;…

Statistical significance tests (SSTs) have been the object of much controversy among social scientists. Proponents have hailed SSTs as an objective means for minimizing the likelihood that chance factors have contributed to research results. Critics have both questioned the logic underlying SSTs and bemoaned the widespread misapplication and…

Researchers persist in using stepwise regression in spite of problems with this approach. As noted by B. Thompson (1995), three problems accompany the use of stepwise applications. The first is that computer packages may use incorrect degrees of freedom in their computations, resulting in a greater likelihood of obtaining a spurious statistical…

In educational effectiveness research, multilevel models are increasingly used because these models take the multilevel structure of the data into account. In this paper, the effect of ignoring one or more levels of variation in hierarchical linear regression is explored, using a model with four hierarchical levels (individual pupil, class group,…