The purpose of this study was to examine the perspectives of key policy informants on the factors that they believed influence policy decisions in literacy education. Participants were selected because they had significantly influenced, or had attempted to influence, policy decisions in literacy at either the national or state level.…

This study examined whether the impact of student-faculty interaction on a range of student outcomes--including academic achievement, goals, self-confidence, well-being, and attitudes--differed for women and men. The data were drawn from a national longitudinal sample of college students (N = 17,637) who were surveyed upon entry to college in 1994…

Choosing the most appropriate method to handle missing data during analyses is one of the most challenging decisions confronting researchers. Often, missing values are just ignored rather than replaced with a reliable imputation method. Six methods of data imputation were used to replace missing data from two data sets of varying sizes; this…

This paper puts forth a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach to estimating higher education institutions' per-student education costs (PSCs) in an effort to redress a number of methodological problems endemic to such estimations, particularly the allocation of shared expenditures between education and other institutional activities. An example…

State accountability systems that are based on test data and the No Child Left Behind Act have put educators under great pressure to improve their students' scores on standardized tests. Much has been written about the possibility that school faculties will resort to "drill and kill," a response that will reduce the quality of children's…

The problem of dimensionality with respect to Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) specifically and, more generally, "g" or fluid intelligence, has been a long-standing issue. The present article reports two studies examining the dimensionality of both the original Set II of the APM (n = 506) and a short form (n = 644), using principal…

For some districts, the current obsession with data grows out of the need to comply with No Child Left Behind and additional accountability-related mandates. For others, it dates way back before the phrase "data-driven decision making" rolled so frequently off the tongues of educators. In either case, there is no denying that an integral…

The colourful, vigorous territorial display behaviour of the Siamese fighting fish, "Betta splendens", has great appeal for both pet enthusiasts and animal behaviourists. Their beauty, longevity, easy maintenance and rearing make them a popular pet and an ideal science laboratory specimen. This investigation utilises "B. splendens" to test for the…

This article examines levels of involvement of weekly church attenders in Catholic parishes in Australia, New Zealand and the United States through an analysis of data from the International Congregational Life Survey. Factor analysis was used to identify four questionnaire items related to parish involvement which were then combined to produce a…

In the process of collecting assessment data in the author's introductory sociology course, he made a startling and disappointing discovery. For the most part, students simply were not bothering to read the basics version of the introductory survey textbook that he assigned. This discovery presented him with two related challenges. First, he had…

The public school superintendency is the most powerful position in U.S. schools. Yet research has shown that women who hold the position have difficulty talking about power (Brunner, 2000). I designed a mixed methods study to investigate how women school superintendents viewed their uses of power. A survey was sent to all women superintendents…

This study proposes a methodology to serve as a guiding mechanism for the allocation and management of university financial resources taking efficiency as its objective. Specifically, an aid model is provided for decision making, so that the planning of staff policy within a university guarantees an equal treatment of all the teaching and research…

This study examined the effect of loneliness, gender, and two dimensions of prospective life domains on adolescent future orientation. Future orientation was studied in four prospective domains: social relations, marriage and family, higher education and work and career. These domains are described in terms of two dimensions: theme (relational vs.…

How do we see young children's thinking in science? Is it, as much previous research has led us to believe, that their ideas can be neatly boxed like "brown paper packages tied up with strings"--as the song from "The Sound of Music" goes? Or are their ideas like "wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings" ("Sound of Music"): fluid, complex,…

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory--Adolescent (MMPI-A) and Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory--2 (MMPI-2) True Response Inconsistency (TRIN) scales are measures of acquiescence and nonacquiescence included among the standard validity scales on these instruments. The goals of this study were to evaluate the effectiveness of…