Background/Context: The essay provides a comprehensive review of work by economists and others in related quantitative disciplines on the transition of students to college. A particular emphasis is given to the role of price and financial aid although issues related to college preparation, access, and persistence are also investigated. The final…

The purpose of this study was to determine China Agricultural University's (CAU's) faculty adoption behaviour about web-based distance education (WBDE). Rogers' (2003) model of five stages in the innovation-decision process was adopted and modified as the theoretical base for the study. Quantitative research was employed and the research design…

From a rhetorical perspective, Mendel's work and its reception elicit two important questions: (a) why were Mendel's arguments so compelling to 20th century biologists? And (b) why where they so roundly ignored by his contemporaries? The focus of this article is to examine the latter question while commenting on the former by employing several…

Evaluations of practice have often adopted experimental or quasi-experimental approaches and have focused heavily on outcomes of innovative programmes. This creates problems in replicating studies and effectively creates obstacles to the sharing of good practice. In this paper, ideas from Pawson and Tilley's (1997) approach to Realistic Evaluation…

Mr. Hartman is an honors-level and Advanced Placement science teacher in a diverse, urban high school where he has been teaching for the last 20 years. In recent years, Mr. Hartman has become increasingly more concerned with the lack of ethnic/cultural diversity in his advanced science classes. On the other hand, Mrs. Rodriguez is a principal in a…

In this paper, the authors explore the potential of garlic ("Allium sativum L.") to illustrate the concept of allelopathy and demonstrate the biological activity of plant volatiles. This article describes several classroom experiments involving garlic that can be used as a method of introducing students of various ages to the following important…

We examined the effects of the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS; Frost & Bondy, 2002) on the manding (requesting) and speech development of school-aged children with autism. In study 1, two participants, Damian and Bob, were taught PECS within a delayed multiple baseline design. Both participants demonstrated increased levels of manding…

Tests of mean equality proposed by Alexander and Govern (1994) and Tsakok (1978) were compared to the well-known procedures of Brown and Forsythe (1974), James (1951), and Welch (1951) for their ability to limit the number of Type I errors in one-way designs where the underlying distributions were nonnormal, variances were nonhomogeneous, and…

This digest offers tips on designing questionnaires and on avoiding common design errors. The following useful suggestions are offered: (1) keep the questionnaire brief and concise; (2) get feedback on the initial list of questions developed; (3) locate personal or confidential questions at the end of the questionnaire; (4) put categories in…

With the advent of the computer and user-friendly statistical software packages, factor analysis has become accessible to most researchers. However, conventional factor analysis, or R-technique, is only useful for research concerning types or groups of variables. Educational and psychological researchers are often interested in types of people,…

The 1994 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) monitored the performance of students in American schools in reading, U.S. history, geography, mathematics, science, and writing. The sample involved more than 135,000 public and private school students who were 9, 13, or 17 years old and/or in grades 4, 8, and 12. This technical report…

Social penetration has been described by S.W. Littlejohn (1992) as "the process of increasing disclosure and intimacy in a relationship." The phrase "social penetration" originated with I. Altman and D. Taylor, the foremost researchers in this area. From other theories, Altman and Taylor developed a unified theory which…

This paper discusses self-assessment--i.e., the act of evaluating or monitoring one's own level of knowledge, performance, and understanding--in a metacognitive framework, taking into account the contexts in which self-assessment occurs. It begins with a brief review of metacognitive and social psychology theories that pertain to self-assessment.…

A study examined the mass media research literature to determine if there was a dominant paradigm in the field. The mass media research published in eight communication journals from 1965 to 1989 was content analyzed to identify paradigm, orientation (focus and theory), data (type, source, and sample), methodology (type and manipulation), and…

In psychological and special education research, group comparison experimental designs are more often used than single subject experimental designs. However, the application of group designs poses many difficulties, such as the collection of large numbers of homogeneous subjects for a particular experimental condition, the averaging of individual…