School leaders struggle in their efforts to implement standards-based grading reforms in large part because they fail to address the inconsistency in grading practices among individual teachers. This article describes three crucial steps necessary to gain greater consistency in teachers' grading practices: (1) Reaching consensus on a purpose…

Debates about appropriate, fair and effective ways of assessing research and researchers have raged through the scientific community for decades, recently mostly concerned with discussing the merits and limitations of metric-based, quantitative assessments versus peer review-based, qualitative alternatives. Ample attention has been paid to formal…

This paper focuses on finding the criteria adopted by users to select free information retrieved from the Web for academic use. A close-ended questionnaire was formulated to record the opinions of the respondents. A survey for various categories of users such as post graduate students, research scholars and faculty members from five universities…

Small sample sizes pose a severe threat to convergence and accuracy of between-group level parameter estimates in multilevel structural equation modeling (SEM). However, in certain situations, such as pilot studies or when populations are inherently small, increasing samples sizes is not feasible. As a remedy, we propose a two-stage regularized…

This study aims to provide an overview of the distribution of the Spanish scientific workforce focusing on differences in authorship position by gender, academic age, number of authors, and research field. The results show some degree of parity in younger age cohorts and areas such as biomedicine, but little participation of females in the oldest…

This research addresses two important developments in the academic field: First, universities are transforming into organisational actors, gaining more responsibilities and capacities for strategic action, and second, competition has reached a new level. An important driver of competition and universities' development towards strategic actorhood…

Evidence syntheses, such as systematic reviews, aim to summarise the current state of research in a field, often using the publication language of a study as a criterion for inclusion or exclusion. However, this has serious implications for capturing evidence from a wider range of geographical areas, and the potential for linguistic bias. In order…

At a time when institutions of higher education are exploring alternatives to traditional admissions testing, institutions are also seeking to better support students and prepare them for academic success. Under such an engaged model, one may seek to measure not just the accumulated knowledge and skills that students would bring to a new academic…

Identifying wordlike units in language is typically done by applying a battery of criteria, though how to weight these criteria with respect to one another is currently unknown. We address this question by investigating whether certain criteria are also used as cues for learning an artificial language--if they are, then perhaps they can be relied…

External validity is an important parameter that needs to be considered for decision making in health research, but no widely accepted measurement tool for the assessment of external validity of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) exists. One of the most limiting factors for creating such a tool is probably the substantial heterogeneity and lack…

This qualitative study explores how teachers assess a bullying scenario and what considerations guide their assessment. Thirty-eight secondary school teachers from across Austria participated in an online survey with open-ended questions based on two vignette: one depicting an incident of verbal and social bullying and the other a non-bullying…

To date, no empirical study has focused on understanding the evolution process of China's college admission policies and clarifying its hidden evolution logic. Based on the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), this study determines different advocacy coalitions and their belief systems during the evolution process of independent enrollment policy,…

Published studies of intervention effects probably report effect sizes that are larger than the true effect size. There are probably many reasons for this, but one can be thought of as a "winner's curse." In this essay, I discuss evidence from two recent studies that highlight how evidence clearinghouses might inadvertently expose…

Background: A systematic review is a secondary research method that follows a predetermined protocol to identify, synthesize, and assess the quality of primary studies that meet pre-established eligibility criteria to answer a specific research question (Higgins & Green, 2011; Higgins & Thomas, 2019). It uses systematic and transparent…

Purpose: As senior district leaders in US public schools make public statements about the importance of teachers of color for all students, their inaction in designing policies to recruit these educators can undermine diversity progress. This study explores the mixed messaging around one small urban district's effort to increase the ethnoracial…