Evidence-based practice has received increased emphasis within the social work field in the past decade and social work educational programs are including more evidence-based practice content in their curricula. This article examines some issues social work educators may wish to consider as they teach evidence-based practice to social work…

Surface similarity generally promotes reasoning by analogy and physical similarity has been shown to have a powerful positive effect on very young children's use of a scale model as a source of information about another space. The research reported here investigated 2 1/2-year-old children's performance in an object retrieval task when asked to…

This study examines the relationship between English as a second language (ESL) learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge, their lexical inferencing strategy use, and their success in deriving word meaning from context. Participants read a passage containing 10 unknown words and attempted to derive the meanings of the unknown words from context.…

Portfolios have been used in a variety of ways for assessing student work. In education, generally, and more specifically in second language education, portfolios have been associated with alternative assessment (Darling-Hammond, 1994; Hamayan, 1995; Shohamy, 1996; Wolf, Bixby, Glenn, & Gardener, 1991). This article defines "alternative…

This paper, written in the twenty-first anniversary year of the journal "Educational Psychology in Practice", attempts to uncover those distinctive aspects of the discipline and the practice of applied psychology in general and educational psychology in particular. After considering some of the reasons for attempting this task at this point in…

This article explores the concept of the "vocational" in contemporary educational discourses, and argues for the centrality of vocational aspects of learning in making meaning. The existing tensions are seen to lie between discourses that place the vocational at the bottom of a hierarchy of knowledge and value, and discourses concerning…

A new report published by the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions is a minor variant on six similar reports published by the Friedman Foundation over the past three years. The new report repeats some of the errors in the previous reports, and it follows a parallel structure, arguing that the costs of dropping out are dramatic for the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship of gender, work factors, and non-work factors with aspirations to positions in senior management. A process model of senior management aspirations was developed and tested. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected via an online survey that resulted in a sample of 368 working…

This guest editorial describes ways teachers can use guessing games about an unknown item in a "mystery box" to help children improve their abilities to listen to others, recall information, ask purposeful questions, classify items by class, make inferences, synthesize information, and draw conclusions. The author presents information…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to review research published by Educational Administration Quarterly (EAQ) during the past 10 years to determine if confidence intervals and effect sizes were being reported as recommended by the American Psychological Association (APA) Publication Manual. Research Design: The author examined 49 volumes of…

This paper draws on earlier work on ideas that underpin the collection and use of evidence in science in schools. It establishes that different types of practical work share the same procedural underpinnings. It then takes the work of Toulmin on argumentation to suggest that the idea of the "public claim" can be used to forge a link…

Many students find it difficult to learn the kinds of knowledge and thinking required by college or high school courses in mathematics, science, or other complex domains. Thus they often emerge with significant misconceptions, fragmented knowledge, and inadequate problem-solving skills. Most instructors or textbook authors approach their teaching…

Recent research in cognitive psychology has drawn attention to the important role that students' personal understandings and representations of subject matter play in the learning process. This paper briefly reviews some of this research and contrasts the kind of learning that results in an individual's changed conception or view of a phenomenon…

Often, all of the variables in a model are latent, random, or subject to measurement error, or there is not an obvious dependent variable. When any of these conditions exist, an appropriate method for estimating the linear relationships among the variables is Least Principal Components Analysis. Least Principal Components are robust, consistent,…

A study examined the effects of age upon the amount and kind of explicit information in oral summary tasks of preschool and third-grade children. Findings show an important developmental change in the use and in the type of inferential operations. Preschool children used fewer connectors and were not as able to preserve the original order of…