Background: This longitudinal study sought to improve understanding of the factors at home and school that influence children's attainment and progress in writing between the ages of 4 and 7 years. Aims: (i) To investigate the relationship between home variables and writing development in preschool children; (ii) to determine associations between…

Students increasingly are comfortable on the World Wide Web and turn to online resources for many of their research needs. All students can benefit, however, from being shown how to find the most appropriate resources and evaluate what they find. Regardless of their own familiarity with the Web, instructors can apply their knowledge of their…

The recent legal challenges to affirmative action in higher education illustrate that moral arguments, such as that affirmative action compensates for past wrongs, no longer justify it. So proponents of affirmative action have changed strategies and now use social science to prove the necessity of affirmative action. This article situates the…

This article argues for a context-sensitive, integrative approach to research on reading, writing, and related text-based practices in second language acquisition (SLA). The approach views literacy not as universal psycholinguistic processes but as constellations of social, cognitive, and linguistic practices that vary with situational and…

This narrative recounts the disruption of my graduate research project by persistent, self-reflexive questioning of the process of doing independent research for the first time, and draws its texts from the resulting master's thesis. In this story, the ethnographic method I chose initially to study the experience of women returning to school to…

There is significant evidence that student-centred approaches to learning using experiential exercises considerably enhance students' understanding of substantive theory and also aid acquisition of transferable skills, such as those pertaining to research management and investigation. We consider an experiential pedagogic approach to be…

Estimates of the costs and consequences of many types of public policy proposals play an important role in the development and adoption of particular policy programs. Estimates of the same, or similar, policies that employ different modeling approaches can yield widely divergent results. Such divergence often undermines effective policymaking.…

This study evaluates the use of full-text databases amongst 425 undergraduate and graduate students in western New York. A review of literature implicated convenience, time issues, article retrieval option knowledge, and the appreciation and understanding of research article quality as potential predictors of full-text reliance. These variables…

This article illustrates (a) 2 recent innovations in the changing criterion research design, (b) how these innovations apply to research and practice in special education, and (c) how clinical needs influence design features of the changing criterion design. The first innovation, the range-bound changing criterion, is a very simple variation of…

The Bermuda Triangle is famous for the unexplained disappearances of ships and aircraft, and for strange meteorological phenomena that allegedly have occurred within its boundaries. This article presents an activity wherein students are asked to create their own geographical triangles to research, but instead of focusing on the unexplainable,…

Participatory research (PR) is a term that was first articulated in Tanzania in the early 1970s to describe a variety of community-based approaches to the creation of knowledge. Taken together these approaches combine social investigation, education and action in an interrelated process. The International Council for Adult Education provided a…

Links between students' achievement goal orientations and learning tactics were investigated using software (gStudy) that supports a variety of learning tactics and strategies. An achievement goal questionnaire was administered to 307 students enrolled in an introductory educational psychology course. Data tracing study tactics were logged for 80…

Empirical support exists for parent training/education (PT/PE) interventions for children with disruptive behavior disorders (DBD) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD). While the models share common roots, current approaches have largely developed independently and the research findings have been disseminated in two different literature traditions:…

Extensive evidence exists demonstrating the utility of Curriculum-Based Measurement in reading (R-CBM) for progress-monitoring purposes; however, most studies have evaluated R-CBM from a traditional psychometric perspective, which allows for variability in individual student's data that is not a function of increased skills (i.e., measurement…

Arguments between response to intervention (RTI) with curriculum-based measurement (CBM) and traditional, individual psychoeducational assessments encourage a false dichotomy between alternatives that are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. This article discusses strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, touches on current legislative…