Robin E. Perry's article, Do Social Workers Make Better Child Welfare Workers Than Non-Social Workers?, is an important step in studying the relationship between education of child welfare workers and their job performance. In this case, however, workers' performance was measured by poorly designed performance evaluation tools completed routinely…

The commonly used method of reliance on failure to reject the conventional null hypothesis as a positive indication of equivalence is questioned in a study. An alternative method, based on a re-visioning of the null hypothesis, is proposed which also avoids the uncontrolled type II error present in the traditional method.

This paper describes the conceptual development of a self-enumerated scale of quality of life (CASP-19) and presents an empirical evaluation of its structure using a combination of exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic approaches across three different survey settings for older people living in England and Wales in the new millennium. All…

This paper estimates models of the evolution of cognitive and noncognitive skills and explores the role of family environments in shaping these skills at different stages of the life cycle of the child. Central to this analysis is identification of the technology of skill formation. We estimate a dynamic factor model to solve the problem of…

This article evaluates the initial psychometric qualities of the School Counseling Program Evaluation Survey (SCoPES). SCoPES is a 64-item instrument designed to correspond to "The National Standards for School Counseling Programs" (Campbell & Dahir, 1997). Coefficient alphas on the overall score and the three subscales (i.e.,…

Active learning is considered by many academics as an important and effective learning strategy. Assessment is integrated in learning as a tool for learning, but traditional assessment methods often encourage surface learning (passive learning) rather than deep learning (active learning). Peer assessment is a method of motivating students,…

Over the past few decades there has been a rise in the number of federally funded large scientific research initiatives, with increased calls to evaluate their processes and outcomes. This article describes efforts to evaluate such initiatives in one agency within the U.S. federal government. The authors introduce the Evaluation of Large…

This paper reviews foreign and domestic sexism research and practice in language testing and reveals that China lags behind in this sociolinguistics perspective in both theoretical study and practice. The paper indicates that sexism is represented in the listening comprehension section in National Matriculation English Test (NMET) after a case…

The purpose of this article is to discuss the role of "baseline studies" in investigations of test impact and to illustrate the type of thinking underlying the design and implementation of such studies by reference to a recent study relating to a high-stakes test of English language proficiency. Baseline studies are used to describe an…

Teachers working with students who exhibit problem behaviors need new tools to assist their efforts to effectively address challenging behavior. The "Behavioral Objective Sequence" (BOS; Braaten, 1998) is a user-friendly instrument that provides a developmental perspective for responding to these behaviors within an instructional model. The BOS…

Background/Context: Prior research on the challenges of college going and retention among adolescents today, particularly low-income, minority, and first-generation college-going youth, provide the context for this article. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article sets the stage for the special issue articles by framing the…

This article is a reflection on an area of particular interest in the current research environment, but which has not yet been explored satisfactorily in the education literature: the evaluation of educational research. The particular focus is on the UK context, but the article is informed by comparative evidence from six countries (gathered…

Despite the best of intentions, qualitative researchers can be faced, in some circumstances, with having to make meaning from thin, or less than optimal, data. Using a real study as context, the authors describe the ways that they made sense of their thin data on teachers' perceptions of a large-scale evaluation instrument. They propose a…

This article traces the roots of narrative research in the social sciences and education, then centers on "story constellations," a version of narrative inquiry that uncovers teachers' knowledge of school reform in context. A fluid form of investigation that unfolds in a three-dimensional inquiry space, story constellations consists of a flexible…

This article explores the nature of self-study of teacher education practices by examining what self-study is and how it might be conducted and reported. In working through these ideas, the article makes an argument for the need for learning through self-study to be documented in ways that might not only be accessible to others but also meaningful…