Many stakeholders have long argued that teachers should use data from their own teaching as a way to improve their performance. The first chapter of this dissertation is a summary of the literature that advises mathematics teachers about what data they should gather and how they should use those data to improve instruction. The literature is…

Nursing educators have been encouraged to engage in the scholarship of teaching as a form of best practice in education. Despite professional documents and encouragement by leaders in the field of nursing, there is very little known about nursing educators' perceptions and engagement in the scholarship of teaching. The purpose of this…

Educational action is a species of praxis in both an Aristotelian sense and a post-Marxian sense: in the first, it involves the morally informed and committed action of the individual practitioners who practise education; in the second, it helps to shape social formations and conditions for collectivities of people. In this paper, it is argued…

Research and teaching are supposed to be closely related in universities. Among academics the belief in a symbiotic relationship is strong. However, it is unclear what form this relationship can take. Several authors have presented categories and dimensions to clarify this relationship and the aim of this project was to contribute to this…

This article describes a continuing project at the University of South Florida that was first presented in the 83(2) issue of "College and University" (Miller 2007) and further detailed in the 83(3) (Miller and Herreid 2008). Through that point the project had established a predictive formula for determining the risk of attrition of…

In recent years, interest has spiked in data-driven decision making in education--that is, using various types of student data to inform decisions in schools and classrooms. In October 2008, the Council of the Great City Schools and American Institutes for Research (AIR) launched a project funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that focused…

Policymakers across the nation are leading efforts to ensure that every classroom has an effective teacher. Faced with the need to dramatically improve student outcomes, states have embraced a policy agenda that promotes and supports teacher quality in many ways, including developing evaluation and compensation policies, targeting professional…

Evidence-based practice espouses that all healthcare professionals should provide their clients with the most effective clinical services based on sound research evidence. This philosophy of practice has since permeated to an array of health care and human service disciplines, and the rehabilitation counseling profession is no exception. Although…

Background/Context: A half-century ago, scholars of teaching observed that there was a disconnect between theory and evidence. This problem remains. Although there is great deal of scholarly activity about teacher effectiveness and quality, discussion of theory is largely separate from empirical evidence. In addition, research on teaching is based…

Volumes 22 and 23 of "Advances in Special Education" address the current top perspectives and issues in the field of EBD by providing chapters written by active researchers and scholarly university professors who specialize in this area. Volume 22 first delineates legal issues, themes, and dimensions related to the historical development…

Purpose: Evidence-based practice (EBP) describes clinical decision making using research, clinical experience, and client values. For family-centered practices, the client's family is integral to this process. This article proposes that using family paradigms, a family science framework, may help elicit and understand client/family values within…

The process and importance of Knowledge Translation (KT) for the field of rehabilitation counseling is described. One element of the KT process, systematic reviews of the literature, is described along with several strategies for grading evidence. Practicing clinicians, as do consumers, encounter a number of barriers to using primary source…

This article begins with a critical consideration of five trends in social and educational research policy and environment in the UK and internationally: (1) the intensification of public criticisms of education research since the mid- and late-1990s; (2) the increasing emphasis on user involvement and focus on use; (3) the ever tighter…

Public presentations of research about charter schools have been politicized, polarized, and personalized, fueling cynicism about whether research can generate objective knowledge and promote the collective good. This article draws two distinctions: between politics as a corrupting force and politics as a healthy and necessary component of…

Teachers need practices that can be implemented in the classroom to teach children how to address conflict and solve problems proactively. There are curricula available for teachers to use in promoting improvement in the social behavior of students and for further enhancing their ability to self-regulate their behavior (Smith, Lochman, &…