The focus of this study was a problem identified by human resources directors and managers in a medium sized community in the southeast of the United States. The problem was that some college graduates are not equipped with the necessary soft skills to be successful in the workforce. Executive directors and human resources managers brought this…

The overall objective of the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) is to collect the information necessary for a comprehensive picture of elementary and secondary education in the United States. The abundance of data collected permits detailed analyses of the characteristics of schools, principals, teachers, school libraries, and public school…

The transition from a usually autocratic to generally participative style of leadership has been a process full of frustration, anxiety, and concerns for Nigerian immigrant pastors in The Apostolic Church (TAC) North America. These pastors have brought the values, concepts, practices, and behavior which they learned in Nigeria to lead the American…

Currently, instruction pays little attention to the development of students' sampling variability reasoning in relation to statistical inference. In this paper, we briefly discuss the especially designed sampling variability learning experiences students aged about 15 engaged in as part of a research project. We examine assessment and…

Statistical tasks that can be solved in a variety of ways provide rich sites for classroom discourse. Orchestrating such discourse requires careful planning and execution. Five specific practices can help teachers do so. The five practices can be used to structure conversations so that coherent classroom narratives about solutions to tasks may be…

Students may need explicit training in informal statistical reasoning in order to design experiments or use formal statistical tests effectively. By using scientific scandals and media misinterpretation, we can explore the need for good experimental design in an informal way. This article describes the use of a paper that reviews the measles mumps…

While regression discontinuity has usually been applied retrospectively to secondary data, it is even more attractive when applied prospectively. In a prospective design, data collection can be focused on cases near the discontinuity, thereby improving internal validity and substantially increasing precision. Furthermore, such prospective…

The Angoff method requires experts to view every item on the test and make a probability judgment. This can be time consuming when there are large numbers of items on the test. In this study, a G-theory framework was used to determine if a subset of items can be used to make generalizable cut-score recommendations. Angoff ratings (i.e.,…

Multiple matrix designs are commonly used in large-scale assessments to distribute test items to students. These designs comprise several booklets, each containing a subset of the complete item pool. Besides reducing the test burden of individual students, using various booklets allows aligning the difficulty of the presented items to the assumed…

This paper describes a new model of students' concern about indebtedness within a rank-based social norms framework. Study 1 found that students hold highly variable beliefs about how much other students will owe at the end of their degree. Students' concern about their own anticipated debt--and their intention of taking on a part-time job during…

This publication describes the methods and procedures used in the 2008/12 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B:08/12). These graduates, who completed the requirements for a bachelor's degree during the 2007-08 academic year, were first interviewed as part of the 2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:08), and then…

Previous research has shown that many choice biases are attenuated when short-run decisions are reframed to the long run. However, this literature has been limited to description-based choice tasks in which possible outcomes and their probabilities are explicitly specified. A recent literature has emerged showing that many core results found using…

Mediation is a causal process that evolves over time. Thus, a study of mediation requires data collected throughout the process. However, most applications of mediation analysis use cross-sectional rather than longitudinal data. Another implicit assumption commonly made in longitudinal designs for mediation analysis is that the same mediation…

The purpose of the present study was to predict the resiliency in parents with exceptional children based on their mindfulness. This descriptive correlational study was performed on 260 parents of student (105 male and 159 female) that were selected by cluster sampling method. Family resiliency questionnaire (Sickby, 2005) and five aspect…

Against the background of the dangers posed by breast cancer world-wide, and the importance of its early detection and therefore breast self examination (BSE), this study investigated the practice of BSE among female students in tertiary institutions in Edo state. A sample of 723 participants selected through a combination of multi-stage,…