In 1988, the author taught remedial Senior English reading at a rural high school. None of the students intended to go to college. Instead, they all planned to be homemakers, farmers, or watermen. On the second day of class, he assigned a short story from the cumbersome literature book. The classroom was quiet for a moment, and then one of the…

While technology has become an integral part of introductory statistics courses, the programs typically employed are professional packages designed primarily for data analysis rather than for learning. Findings from several studies suggest that use of such software in the introductory statistics classroom may not be very effective in helping…

The correction for attenuation due to measurement error (CAME) has received many historical criticisms, most of which can be traced to the limited ability to use CAME inferentially. Past attempts to determine confidence intervals for CAME are summarized and their limitations discussed. The author suggests that inference requires confidence sets…

This design study tracks the development of student thinking about natural variation as late elementary grade students learned about distribution in the context of modeling plant growth at the population level. The data-modeling approach assisted children in coordinating their understanding of particular cases with an evolving notion of data as an…

This essay examines contradictory attitudes toward teaching and writing at a small college. Looking at her "private" experience as a teacher and "public" experience as a WPA, the author considers how assumptions about the privatization of teaching inhibit deep understanding of teaching and learning as intellectual work.

Causal inference is an important, controversial topic in the social sciences, where it is difficult to conduct experiments or measure and control for all confounding variables. To address this concern, the present study presents a probability index to assess the robustness of a causal inference to the impact of a confounding variable. The…

One of the major characteristics of mathematics is that one can derive new information from old information with logical certainty. The fancy word for deriving information is inference. The elementary school and secondary school years are the time for the construction of logical operations and the development of tactics and skills which are at…

One of the most consistent regularities observers would see in schools is the grouping of children by grade. The authors' work with schoolchildren causes them to ask, what is a grade beyond a group of children at a particular age? In this article, the authors share a glimpse of an activity involving inference and logical necessity that they…

This article looks into the workings of educational authority. While scholarly debate in education usually promotes authority as either good or bad, the same debate seldom asks questions about how authority works. This article is, then, an answer to the question "How?" How does educational authority operate? It operates, it is suggested, in much…

The gap between the educational achievements of the comparatively wealthy and those living in poverty is widening world-wide, with the associated threat to social cohesion. Twenty-five years of curriculum reform has largely failed in its objective of providing quality, basic education for all. Arguing that successful innovation requires the…

Understanding why traditional cultures weaken matters because they embody humanity's heritage. Schooling has been singled out as an abrader of traditional culture. We assess whether schooling erodes one aspect of traditional culture: social capital as shown by generosity to people outside the household. In industrial nations researchers find…

The role of curriculum-based data in educational decision making, particularly with regard to the assistive technology (AT) consideration process, has become increasingly important. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) and other demands for school accountability require teachers to be more thoughtful about all decisions regarding students…

The assessment for learning framework in education has become big business: huge quantities of time, money and energy have been invested in England, Wales and more recently the USA. This article shows that the assessment for learning theory is inefficient and often contradictory. Black and Wiliam's earlier work provides much of the theoretical…

This paper provides a framework for developing sampling designs in mixed methods research. First, we present sampling schemes that have been associated with quantitative and qualitative research. Second, we discuss sample size considerations and provide sample size recommendations for each of the major research designs for quantitative and…

In this paper, the authors complete the summative stage of the validity argument approach, then use their experiences to reflect on the validity argument as a method. They begin by evaluating the inferences and assumptions of the interpretive argument for the MKT measures. Then they examine both the form and the structure of the interpretive…