When tasked with selecting a Course Management System (CMS), the first step many responsible colleges, universities and consortia take is to name a selection committee of faculty, administration, students and possibly IT staff. They do some Web searching and talk to colleagues, friends and counterparts at other institutions. This same committee…

Following months of pressure from states and education groups, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has announced a pilot program that will let some states use what are known as growth models to evaluate the success of schools and districts under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Growth models track the progress of youngsters over…

This article proposes an item exposure control method, which is the extension of the Sympson and Hetter procedure and can provide item exposure control at both the item and test levels. Item exposure rate and test overlap rate are two indices commonly used to track item exposure in computerized adaptive tests. By considering both indices, item…

This article presents compelling evidence, both from the literature and from their study, that attempting to improve the DSM-IV criteria for pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) can be quite frustrating. DSM-IV is a categorical system. While the diagnosis of autism is quite robust, diagnostic agreement for PDD-NOS is…

This article details the work of Sally Lancaster of Everett Public Schools in Washington. Sally Lancaster may be an educator by training, but she knows the value of libraries. As assistant principal of Alternative Programs for the Everett Public Schools, Lancaster led a statewide battle that not only saved the criteria for school libraries in the…

We propose an alternative method to partial least squares for path analysis with components, called generalized structured component analysis. The proposed method replaces factors by exact linear combinations of observed variables. It employs a well-defined least squares criterion to estimate model parameters. As a result, the proposed method…

In this article, the authors trace the historical context of character education legislation in the United States, analyze and evaluate current legislative trends, and discuss the inherent dangers in legislating the good. The survey concludes that at no other time in history have Americans attempted to legislate such a specific vision of character…

Thirty-six per cent of 18-19-year-old sixth-form and further education college leavers in the UK currently go on to university. A majority of the remaining 64 percent apparently go into work or work-related training. Yet, for this latter group, as with the former, 16-19 education was supposed by the Department for Education and Employment to equip…

How might qualitative researchers meaningfully operate in a contemporary research climate that holds to such limited conceptions of what constitutes "scientific" research in education? This article discusses implications of scientifically based research (SBR) and identifies several pathways along which researchers may productively work in such a…

This study provided a test of the multiple criteria concept used for lexical decision, as implemented in J. Grainger and A. M. Jacobs's (1996) multiple read-out model. This account predicts more inhibition (or less facilitation) from a masked neighbor when accuracy is stressed more but more facilitation (or less inhibition) when the speed of…

A multiple-form structure (MFS) is an ordered collection or network of testlets (i.e., sets of items). An examinee's progression through the network of testlets is dictated by the correctness of an examinee's answers, thereby adapting the test to his or her trait level. The collection of paths through the network yields the set of all possible…

In this article, the author comments on the issue of race and education in America. The author predicts that although the Supreme Court's recent ruling sheds some welcome light on affirmative action for higher education, the debate over the merit and methods of diversifying the student body will continue. By proactively addressing diversity,…

Career theory, to date, has provided several frameworks for understanding how employees develop during their careers. However, these frameworks have not yet directly examined the criteria older workers use to evaluate their success in aging in the workplace. In the present study, the authors develop an inventory of tentative criteria for…

The special safeguards and standards under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) for disciplinary "removals," or suspensions and expulsions, are complicated and controversial. The manifestation-determination (M-D) requirement plays a central role in this special framework (Zirkel, 2003). The 2004 Amendments of the IDEA…

No study has comprehensively examined what types of students are attending new small schools in New York City and whether these students have different characteristics, on average, than students at the schools they replaced. This study fills this gap by comparing the characteristics of entering new small high school students with those of all…