Over the past five years, the No Child Left Behind Act, with its mandates for collecting and documenting student achievement statistics, has fueled a surge in the volume of data collected by schools, districts, and state education departments. This information explosion has gone hand in hand with technology's growing affordability and…

This article examines whether an analysis of student answers to a standards-based, summative examination can be used to improve a teacher's instruction. The author, who is a chemistry teacher at Saratoga Springs High School, analyzed both the multiple-choice and the constructed response questions of the June 2003 New York State chemistry exam…

Institutional researchers frequently use national datasets such as those provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The authors of this chapter explore the adjustments required when analyzing NCES data collected using complex sample designs. (Contains 8 tables.)

Because surveys now can be implemented with relative ease and little cost, many researchers are overlooking the basic principles of survey research. This chapter discusses sources of error that researchers should consider when conducting a survey, and gives readers basic suggestions for reducing error. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

This article extends Simpson's (2003) research on sex differences in social dilemmas. To test the hypotheses that men defect in response to greed and women to fear, Simpson created Fear and Greed Dilemmas, but experiments using these games supported the greed hypothesis only. In this article I focus on why the fear hypothesis failed and suggest…

Although a number of studies have associated recasts with second language development, the actual mechanisms by which recasts work to impact learning are still little understood. In particular, researchers have sought to gain a deeper understanding of the connections among recasts, learners' responses to recasts, and subsequent development. To…

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 article reports on the results of a research study that investigated the effectiveness of using an algorithmic approach to error correction to help Hong Kong English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners overcome persistent lexico-grammatical problems. Ten error types were selected for the experiment, and one set of remedial instructional…

Recently, tasks have been advocated for their role in promoting participation in L2 interaction and the provision and use of feedback by language learners (Bygate, M., Skehan, P., Swain, M. (Eds.), 2001. "Researching Pedagogical Tasks: Second Language Learning, Teaching and Testing." Pearson Education, Harlow). The relationship between various…

This paper describes a study in which we investigated the effects of corrective feedback on learner uptake in CALL. Learner uptake is here defined as learner responses to corrective feedback in which, in case of an error, students attempt to correct their mistake(s). 177 students from three Canadian universities participated in the study during…

The aim of this study was to identify the type of conceptual change (assimilation or accommodation) that can be induced by a refutational text. Individual interviews were carried out with a stratified sample of eighty-seven grade 9 students. Forty-four percent of them were found to have a misconception about the concept of ecological role--they…

This paper addresses the effect of error correction on second language learning by focusing on feedback and it's effect on language acquisition. The paper deals specifically with the written form of the target language and looks at how the second language teacher can address errors that interfere with written communication in such a way that the…

Guidelines for Hebrew language proficiency are presented in two companion volumes which are identical except that one gives examples of various linguistic forms in Hebrew and the other provides them in Roman script. These guidelines are based on the generic guidelines published in 1986 by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.…

Research on adult second-language (L2) learner's self-repair is reported. Repairs are defined as "structure shifts," which are types of correction or improvement where the speaker leaves a structure uncompleted, abandoning it or shifting to another structure. Two principal types of repairs are distinguished: code- and discourse-related…

An in-progress interdisciplinary research effort, Conversation Analytic (CA) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) study, is reported. A conversation analytic approach to repair and self-explication is taken that covers both human studies and artificial intelligence. The term "human" is used here in place of "linguistic." Three…