Of interest in this study were the factors that lead to quality child care centers. The Early Childhood Environmental Rating Scale-Revised (ECERS-R) was examined for its utility as an effective training device to enlighten directors and classroom teachers of what constitutes quality classrooms. An experimental design was employed for this study.…

The problem of finding optimal calibration designs for dichotomous item response theory (IRT) models has been extensively studied in the literature. In this study, this problem will be extended to polytomous IRT models. Focus is given to items described by the nominal response model (NRM). The optimizations objective is to minimize the generalized…

The nature of public schooling, particularly at the early and middle childhood levels, makes designing critical qualitative studies around gay and lesbian issues in the school context problematic at best. This article provides a retrospective dialogue between an associate professor and her then Ph.D. candidate advisee that reflects on the tension…

Cultural context should be taken into account in our research so that we characterize how people behave in their everyday lives, not just a sterile laboratory environment. Much developmental research treats children as though they group in a sociocultural vacuum. Such research misses important points about development. The article illustrates the…

In order to learn the concept of statistical techniques one needs to run real experiments that generate reliable data. In practice, the data from some well-defined process or system is very costly and time consuming. It is difficult to run real experiments during the teaching period in the university. To overcome these difficulties, statisticians…

In this study, the author analyzed the effects of using the Self-Advocacy Strategy to increase student participation in Individualized Education Program conferences. An experimental design was used to collect data throughout the students' IPLAN program. Student participation and ability to self-advocate increased when the Self-Advocacy Strategy…

The past two decades have seen an explosion in research in the fields of violence and trauma and behavior genetics. These two fields came into direct conflict when Lisabeth Fisher DiLalla and Irving I. Gottesman outlined a fundamental conceptual limitation of trauma and violence research: that rather than being causal, the well-documented…

The Mixed Model (MM) design, sometimes known as a Split-Plot design, is very popular in educational research. This model can be used to examine the effects of several independent variables on a dependent variable and it offers a more powerful alternative to the completely randomized design. The MM design considers both a between-subjects factor,…

Offers considerations for statistics instructors of behavioral and social science students, in light of the research showing these students often perform significantly worse in statistics than in other classes. Suggests that instructors reflect on the context (student goals and background), course content, and pedagogical style when designing and…

Ethnography derives from traditional anthropology, where time in the field is needed to discern both the depth and complexity of social structures and relations. Funding bodies, seeking quick completion, might see ethnographies as unlikely to satisfy 'value for money' criteria, in spite of the rewards to be gained from time-consuming 'thick…

Important findings are often a balance between the rigor of the experimental design and innovativeness of the experimental question. One broad topic area that has received a great deal of discussion, but little empirical study, is the evaluation of educational systems. Experimental designs that permit the analysis of practices used by state…

In research on teachers' beliefs, a distinction is often made between what teachers state ("professed beliefs") and what is reflected in teachers' practices ("attributed beliefs"). Researchers claim to have found both consistencies and inconsistencies between professed and attributed beliefs. In this paper, methods and research designs typically…

The "Journal of Counseling & Development" ("JCD") is the principal journal of the American Counseling Association (ACA) and is considered as the premier counseling journal in the world. The Research section of JCD is devoted primarily to publishing empirical investigations related to counseling theory and methods, counselor training and education,…

We rely a great deal on the schematic descriptions that represent experimental and quasi-experimental design arrangements, as well as the discussions of threats to validity associated with these, provided by Campbell and his associates: Stanley, Cook, and Shadish. Some of these designs include descriptions of treatments removed, removed and then…

Teacher professional development is essential to efforts to improve our schools. This article maps the terrain of research on this important topic. It first provides an overview of what we have learned as a field, about effective professional development programs and their impact on teacher learning. It then suggests some important directions and…