As part of the "District of Columbia School Choice Incentive Act of 2003" Congress mandated evaluation of this first federally funded, private school voucher program in the United States (now called the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP). This report presents findings from the evaluation on the impacts 2 years after families who…

The purpose of this study was to describe the differences of teachers with and without National Board Certification in relation to their percentages of student competency in high school physical education. Data from the South Carolina Physical Education Assessment Program (SCPEAP) were used as the measure of student competency. Student competency…

This study examined the effects of training on peer assessment and comments provided regarding oral presentations in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classrooms. In Study 1, both the treatment and control groups received instruction on skill aspects, but only the treatment group was given an additional 40-minute training on how to rate…

This study determined the effectiveness of Kindergarten Peer-Assisted Learning Strategies (K-PALS) for English Learners (ELs). We compared 20 K-PALS ELs to 20 Control ELs and to 20 K-PALS non-ELs on early reading skill acquisition, using a pretest-posttest control group design with matched samples. We also compared proportions of ELs unresponsive…

Creative problem solving (CPS) is an approach for identifying solutions to problems within a structured, facilitated process. In the current studies, CPS was customized for general education intervention (GEI) teams in elementary schools. In the first study, 24 GEI teams were randomly assigned either to a CPS for GEI training condition or to a…

This article describes comparison group research designs and discusses how such designs can be used in school counseling research to demonstrate the effectiveness of school counselors and school counseling interventions. The article includes a review of internal and external validity constructs as they relate to this approach to research. Examples…

One of the most difficult concepts for statistics students is the standard error of the mean. To improve understanding of this concept, 1 group of students used a hands-on procedure to sample from small populations representing either a true or false null hypothesis. The distribution of 120 sample means (n = 3) from each population had standard…

Background: The current study examined the neuro-cognitive network of visual word rhyming judgment in 14 children with dyslexia and 14 age-matched control children (8- to 14-year-olds) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Methods: In order to manipulate the difficulty of mapping orthography to phonology, we used conflicting and…

Forty-eight college students, 24 of them dyslexic, were presented with four sentences of increasing complexity. Participants were asked to repeat each sentence and a record was kept of the number of repetitions required before 100% correct accuracy was achieved. None of the 24 control participants required a total of more than eight repetitions…

A better understanding of factors influencing retention in breast cancer risk education and prevention programs can improve the design and effectiveness of such programs. Such information may also be useful to researchers seeking to maximize full retention in research trials involving low risk and low perceived benefit by the participants. These…

The purpose of this study was to assess to what extent specific reading disabilities and poor phonologic processing in children who read Hebrew, a primarily consonant orthography, are related to central auditory temporal processing deficits (TPDs). Twenty-four Hebrew-speaking children (ages 10-13) with and without reading disabilities were asked…

Purpose: Two studies are presented here. Study 1 was aimed at evaluating whether the voice characteristics of women who use birth control pills that contain different progestins differ from the voice characteristics of a control group. Study 2 presents a meta-analysis that combined the results of Study 1 with those from 3 recent studies that…

The aim of this study was to investigate whether children with high-functioning autism (HFA), Asperger's syndrome (AS), and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDDNOS) can be differentiated from each other and from normal controls on their neurocognitive executive functioning (EF) profile. Children with HFA and AS showed the…

We assessed the disembedding performance on the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) of high-functioning subjects with autism or autism spectrum disorders from multi-incidence families and the performance of their parents. The individuals with autism spectrum disorders were significantly faster than matched controls in locating the shape, but their parents…

Author severely criticized a book on encounter groups by Lieberman, Yalom, and Miles (1973) and stated that it was a methodological morass, theroetically obsolescent, and almost totally unjustified in its conclusions. (Author/RK)