K-12 Illinois public school facilities need to be repaired and rebuilt. The County School Facility Occupation Tax (CSFT) was made law in 2007 in Illinois to help provide funding for Illinois public school facilities. This single case study, qualitative research, outlines findings from 86, face-to- face, phone and email interviews and approximately…

Assessment in higher education has focused on the performance of individual students. This focus has been a practical as well as an epistemic one: methods of assessment are constrained by the technology of the day, and in the past they required the completion by individuals under controlled conditions of set-piece academic exercises. Recent…

This study assesses the effectiveness of critical thinking drills (CTDs), a repetitious classroom activity designed to improve methodological and statistical thinking in relation to psychological claims embedded in popular press articles. In each of four separate CTDs, students critically analyzed a brief article reporting a recent psychological…

Most large-scale summative assessments present results in terms of cumulative scores. Although such descriptions can provide insights into general trends over time, they do not provide detail of how students solved the tasks. Less restrictive access to raw data from these summative assessments has occurred in recent years, resulting in…

Recordings of human interaction data can be organized into temporal representations with different affordances. We use audio data of a learning-related discussion analyzed for its low-level emotional indicators and divided into four phases, each characterized by an overarching emotion. After arguing for the relevance of emotion to learning, we…

The purpose of this ethnographic case study was to study the language development of 4-year-old emergent bilinguals in a bilingual (Spanish/English) Head Start classroom with flexible language practices. Data were collected throughout the 10-month school year by visiting the classroom 2-3 times per week. Data include: field notes (observations and…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are completing high school with reasonable expectations for postsecondary success. College educators are likely ill prepared to provide appropriate support for these students. Based on personal interviews with a diverse group of students with autism, this study (a) amplifies these students' voices,…

Teachers must be proficient at using data to evaluate the effects of instructional strategies and interventions, and must be able to make, describe, justify, and validate their data-based instructional decisions to parents, students, and educational colleagues. An important related skill is the ability to accurately read and interpret…

Learning progress assessment (LPA) provides formative information about effectiveness of instructional decisions. Learning curves are usually presented as graphical illustrations. However, little is known about teachers understanding and interpreting of graphically presented information. An instrument to measure competencies in reading graphs from…

This study examines whether principals' movements and school achievement are associated with their salaries. Predictors of principal salaries were examined using three years of panel data. Results from a fixed-effects regression analysis suggest that principals who moved to school leadership positions in other districts leveraged higher salaries…

While research on teaching qualitative methods in education has increased, few studies explore teaching qualitative data analysis software within graduate-level methods courses. During 2013, we required students in several such courses to use ATLAS.ti™ as a project management tool for their assignments. By supporting students' early experiences…

In this article I problematize the reasons for and methods through which I incorporated an opportunity for experiential learning, via a Community Inquiry Project, into my own teaching. I take the stance of a teacher-researcher to closely analyze the specific documents and tasks used to introduce pre-service teachers to the project. I draw on…

Webquest, first introduced by Dodge in 1995, is a research and inquiry tool that uses the Internet as a resource. The interest of the students regarding the characteristics is included in the related literature according to the researches made. There is a need for studies to be regarded by the teacher candidates for the webquests regarded by the…

Centrifugation is a major unit operation in chemical and biotechnology industries. Here we present a simple, hands-on laboratory experiment to teach the basic principles of centrifugation and to explore the shear effects of centrifugation using bacterial cells as model particles. This experiment provides training in the use of a bench-top…

This study investigates the relationships among factor correlations, inter-item correlations, and the reliability estimates of subscores, providing a guideline with respect to psychometric properties of useful subscores. In addition, it compares subscore estimation methods with respect to reliability and distinctness. The subscore estimation…