Describes the background, development, and testing of a computer software program designed to teach principles of statistical sampling in social science courses. Compares results of a field test of the program, Introduction to Sampling Error Experiments (ISEE), with traditional instruction. (CFR)

Assessments in English that are constructed for native English speakers may not provide valid inferences about the achievement of English language learners (ELLs). The linguistic complexity of the test items that are not related to the content of the assessment may increase the measurement error, thus reducing the reliability of the assessment.…

Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) aims at describing educational resources in order to allow better reusability and retrieval. In this article we show how additional inference rules allows us to derive additional metadata from existing ones. Additionally, using these rules as integrity constraints helps us to define the constraints on LOM elements,…

Objective: The purpose of this article was to examine how an initiative of 10 collaborative projects focused on children and youth have applied principles of participatory research, collaboratories, and technological solutions. Method: The study analyzed multiple forms of qualitative data, including semiannual formative evaluations and…

Components of first-grade intervention programs that addressed oral language and listening comprehension instruction within an intensive literacy intervention for native Spanish-speaking students struggling with reading difficulties are described. Findings for the intervention are based on 4 large-scale experimental studies (published elsewhere)…

Comparing the analyses based on the data of 1,235 Chinese children referred for government services and subsequently diagnosed as children with dyslexia in Hong Kong and those of 690 Chinese children in the sample for the normative study of the Hong Kong Test of Specific Learning Difficulties in Reading and Writing, we explored the reading-writing…

Understanding the current conflicts and political changes in the Middle East us important for American educators if American students are to understand the dynamics of the region. To discuss these issues, FPRI held its 12th History Institute for Teachers on October 16-17, 2004. Forty teachers from 15 states attended the weekend program at the…

The resources necessary to create, administer, and score performance assessments in science were studied. RAND and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) designed performance tasks for science in grades five and six as part of a larger study of the feasibility of science performance assessment. Tasks were developed in pairs in task…

This digest focuses on the data that show significant disparities between the number of teachers of color and the number of students of color and examines how well schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing in supplying teachers of color for U.S. classrooms. The document is organized into three sections. The first section discusses…

When teachers search the literature for activities they can do with their students, they are exposed to science process vocabulary that is improperly used and ambiguous in meaning. This is particularly so with the science process skills of observing, inferring, and hypothesizing. This study examines the process understanding of science teachers at…

A study of interlanguage comprehension, part of a larger project by the Gothenburg research group, investigated the telephone conversations between advanced learners and native speakers of Swedish. In four of the eight conversations, the non-native speakers called the public library to get information on how to borrow books; in the other four the…

This report presents data from the March 1988 Current Population Survey on the demographic, social, and economic characteristics of the Hispanic population of the United States, including age, sex, marital status, educational attainment, school enrollment, fertility, voting and registration, employment status, family composition and size, income,…

A new computer-based approach for teaching counselors about predictive validity and how to use tests in clinical decision making was developed and tested. The approach is based on concepts similar to those used in inferential statistics, particularly statistical hypothesis testing. To implement this model, the counselor must: (1) determine the…

In order to build robust natural language processing systems that can detect and recover from miscommunication, the investigation of how people communicate and how they recover from problems in communication described in this artificial intelligence report focused on reference problems which a listener may have in determining what or whom a…

Statistical significance is misused in educational and psychological research when it is applied as a method to establish the reliability of research results. Other techniques have been developed which can be correctly utilized to establish the generalizability of findings. Methods that do provide such estimates are known as invariance or…