This First Look introduces new data from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009, collected in 2013 when most sample members were recent high school graduates, and in 2014 from the high school transcripts of students who were freshmen in 2009. The analyses examine students' high school completion status; plans for postsecondary enrollment and…

The rumored death of librarianship caused by the advent of technology has not, and will not, come to pass. In this article, the author describes how technology has exponentially increased the librarian's ability to provide library service at the Calcasieu Parish Public Library, where she serves as head of Collection & Computing Services. The…

The comparative format used in ranking and paired comparisons tasks can significantly reduce the impact of uniform response biases typically associated with rating scales. Thurstone's (1927, 1931) model provides a powerful framework for modeling comparative data such as paired comparisons and rankings. Although Thurstonian models are generally…

At the suggestion of a colleague, I read "The Code Book", [32], by Simon Singh to get a basic introduction to the RSA encryption scheme. Inspired by Singh's book, I designed a Ball State University Honors Colloquium in Mathematics for both majors and non-majors, with material coming from "The Code Book" and many other sources. This course became…

When children apologize, they accept responsibility for wrongdoings and act to reconcile social relationships. Apologies to siblings were coded in 40 families that were observed for 9 h when children were 2 1/2 and 4 1/2 years old, and again 2 years later. We found that sibling apologies were rare, generally simple in form, and more frequent after…

Acrostic poems make use of a keyword written vertically, where each line of the poem begins with a letter of the keyword. The structure of this formula poem combined with teacher modeling provides a scaffold for students, showing them how to think flexibly and develop ideas and choose interesting words. Moreover, encoding information in poetic…

People were trained to decode noise-vocoded speech by hearing monosyllabic stimuli in distorted and unaltered forms. When later presented with different stimuli, listeners were able to successfully generalize their experience. However, generalization was modulated by the degree to which testing stimuli resembled training stimuli: Testing stimuli's…

We explored the everyday experiences of 18- to 36-month-old toddlers at two study sites and the influence of adaptation to the host culture on the everyday experiences of children from migrant families. First- and second-generation Puerto Rican families in Connecticut, USA, first- and second-generation Turkish families in Bochum, Germany, as well…

In two studies we investigated 2-year-old children's answers to predicate-focus questions depending on the preceding context. Children were presented with a successive series of short video clips showing transitive actions (e.g., frog washing duck) in which either the action (action-new) or the patient (patient-new) was the changing, and therefore…

Gestalt psychologists proposed two distinct learning mechanisms. Associative learning occurs gradually through the repeated co-occurrence of external stimuli or memories. Insight learning occurs suddenly when people discover new relationships within their prior knowledge as a result of reasoning or problem solving processes that re-organize or…

This paper reports a textual analysis of letters written by 21 male and 21 female participants in Persian. Each writer wrote two letters, one to a dating service and another one to a hypothetical person chosen and introduced by the center. Therefore, a total of 84 letters were collected from the participants. Schema theory was used to find the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the overarching framework of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) reading instructional approach reflected in an EFL secondary school curriculum in Malaysia. Based on such analysis, a comparison was made if Communicative Task-Based Language is the overarching instructional approach for the Malaysian EFL…

The central purpose of this multiple-case study was to describe the professional identities of six general music teachers who identified as instrumentalists as undergraduates. The study builds upon research addressing why students choose music education (Bergee, et al., 2001; Bright, 2006; Gillespie & Hamann, 1999; Lee, 2003; Madsen &…

Difficulty with social competence is a core deficit of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Research on typically developing children suggests the amount of adult talk they are exposed to can positively affect their social competence. With growth in the number of children with ASD entering the inclusive preschool classroom, there is a need to…

Effective communication skills are a vital component of student academic achievement and success, yet students often struggle with them. This study utilized an organizational writing graphic organizer based on a critical thinking model to determine the impact of its use on the persuasive writing scores of 9th-grade students. A sample of…