Purpose: To help to clarify the role of XML tools and standards in supporting transition and migration towards a fully XML-based environment for managing access to information. Design/methodology/approach: The Ching Digital Image Library, built on a three-tier architecture, is used as a source of examples to illustrate a number of methods of data…

Thirty kindergarten children from two classrooms participated in a 3-week curricular unit on dinosaurs designed to teach taxonomic relations and distinguishing features aligned with 15 dinosaur species. Both domain-specific learning and strategic performance on a Twenty Questions game were assessed twice throughout the curriculum, as well as…

Recent empirical research has shown that children with sexual behavior problems and adolescents who offend sexually are diverse populations consisting of several subtypes (Hall, Mathews, & Pearce, 2002; Pithers, Gray, Busconi, & Houchens, 1998; Worling, 2001). This article reviews the descriptive and empirical research related to identifying…

Catalogers and library educators have long articulated the importance of preparing entry-level catalog librarians for the profession. The professional literature suggests that graduates of accredited LIS distance programs will perform at an equivalent level with those from accredited residential programs. This case study of a beginning cataloging…

How would translators approach a process in which they have to make decisions on mapping the grammatically enforced regular number mechanism of a language such as English onto a system like Japanese, where there is no regular coding of number in a noun phrase? Utilizing the concepts of motivation for representation of number, and of "formal-shift"…

This article defines "higher level mathematical skills" and details an important class: that of "constructing instances" of mathematical objects satisfying certain properties. Comment is made on the frequency of higher level tasks in undergraduate work. We explain how such questions may be assessed "in practice" without the imposition on staff of…

While there are many benefits of group diversity, research has indicated that negative effects are also present. Drawing from the social psychology literature, the purpose of this paper is to outline strategies aimed at transforming the negative effects of group diversity: mutual intergroup differentiation, decategorization, and recategorization.…

The linguistic classification of English speakers from outer-circle countries, such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore, is often ambiguous because the Englishes they speak are considered different from interlanguages yet are not considered native varieties. This study investigates whether outer-circle speakers can be viewed as equivalent to…

In this lesson, students use Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans--a "wild" candy written about in the Harry Potter books and now available in stores--to learn about classification and dichotomous keys. In these activities, students sort jelly beans according to a key and then construct a key for a "new" flavor of beans. Students then build on their…

Auditory event-related potentials (mismatch negativity and P300) and behavioral discrimination were measured to synthetically generated consonant-vowel (CV) speech and nonspeech contrasts in 10 young adults with normal auditory systems. Previous research has demonstrated that behavioral and P300 responses reflect a phonetic, categorical level of…

This study uses the state report cards published by the Tennessee Department of Education to compare the academic achievement grades to the value-added grades to determine if there is a relationship between the two grading systems. The data used for this study are from the 2001, 2002, and the 2003 state report cards published for each school using…

EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2006 Summary Report summarizes much of the data collected through the 2006 EDUCAUSE core data survey about campus information technology (IT) environments at 933 colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. The report presents aggregates of data through more than 100 tables and accompanying descriptive…

In this study, we investigated a variety of Reader effects that may influence the validity of ratings assigned to AP® English Literature and Composition essays. Specifically, we investigated whether Readers exhibit changes in their levels of severity and accuracy, and their use of individual scale categories over time. We refer to changes in these…

On July 14, 2006, the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) released a study that compared the performance in reading and math of 4th and 8th graders attending private and public schools. According to the NCES study, students attending private schools performed better than students attending public schools.…

Introduction: This study investigated unmonitored referrals in a nationwide, collaborative chat reference service. Specifically, it examined the extent to which questions are referred, the types of questions that are more likely to be referred than others, and the level of user satisfaction with the referrals in the collaborative chat reference…