There is continuing concern about the low enrolment of students on to some undergraduate science courses, especially physics. Here we explore some of the reasons that might underpin this. The views about physics and biology of Year 1 undergraduate students on English, physics and biology programmes of study were compared using a closed-form…

Schools today are more data rich than ever, requiring staff members to develop their data literacy--that is, their knowledge of how to use assessment data with other types of data to identify areas of effectiveness and to target instructional improvement efforts. Administrators and teachers are expected to use combinations of data (diagnostic and…

Organizing the work of instructional improvement around a process that has specific, manageable steps helps educators build confidence and skill in using data. A process that includes eight distinct steps can take school leaders to use their assessment data effectively, and organized these steps into three phases: Prepare, Inquire, and Act. The…

A limited amount of research has examined the relationship between characteristics of police organizations and policing styles. In particular, few studies have examined the link between organizational structures and police officer arrest decisions. Wilson's (1968) pioneering case study of police organizations suggested that individual police…

Teaching practice can improve if teachers are able to look at themselves and student data in an objective manner. In most education training programs, teachers are not taught to use data to design curriculum and analyze their instructional practices. They need training in both data management and analysis as well as in facilitating discussions…

Collaboration is considered a key to the survival of the school library media specialist in the 21st century school. It is a measure of a library media specialist's abilities and successes as an educator. It is a means for illustrating the need for a professional in the school's library media center during difficult times when trying to save…

The origin of the present comment lies in a failed attempt to obtain, through e-mailed requests, data reported in 141 empirical articles recently published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Our original aim was to reanalyze these data sets to assess the robustness of the research findings to outliers. We never got that far. In June…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…

To compare college and university student engagement in two countries with different responses to global forces, Canada and the United States (US), a series of hierarchical linear regression (HLM) models were developed to analyse data from the 2006 administration of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Overall, students in the U.S.…

The National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality (TQ Center) designed the Interactive Data Tools to provide users with access to state and national data that can be helpful in assessing the qualifications of teachers in the states and the extent to which a state's teacher policy climate generally supports teacher quality. The Interactive Data…

Using Mississippi and North Carolina as cases, the author examines progress made toward the desegregation of enrollments in public colleges and universities. Enrollment trends are analyzed in the context of contemporary social, legal, and educational policy initiatives intended to desegregate dual systems of public higher education. Despite more…

To what extent are the discourse behaviors of examiners salient to participants of an oral performance test? This exploratory study employs a grounded ethnographic approach to investigate the perceptions of the verbal, paralinguistic and nonverbal discourse behaviors of an examiner in a one-on-one role-play task that is one of four tasks in an…

Researchers who use video to record interactions usually need to translate the video data into another medium at some stage in order to facilitate its analysis and dissemination. This article considers some methodological issues that arise in this process by examining transcripts, diagrams and pictures as examples of different techniques for…

Context: Drawing from Ingersoll's (2001) study of teacher attrition, Huberman's (1989) study of the professional life cycle of teachers, and recent retention/attrition literature across the professions, this study seeks to make sense of the complexities of contemporary teachers' careers in light of changes in social and economic forces, the…

Constructing model hot air balloons is an activity that captures the imaginations of students, enabling teachers to present required content to minds that are open to receive it. Additionally, there are few activities that lend themselves to integrating so much content across subject areas. In this article, the authors describe how they have…