Compares the performance of music teachers with teachers of other subjects on the 10 competencies selected by the Alabama Career Incentive Program. Reports that music teachers' competency scores were below the mean for all teachers on 7 of the 10 competencies, but that music teachers outperformed other teachers in using materials and eliciting…

In examining the issue of overrepresentation of minority students in special education, this article distinguishes between the percentage of category or program by group and percentage of group in category or program, which provide very different perspectives. Caution in interpreting data from the Office of Civil Rights relating "race/ethnicity"…

Discusses data from a national survey of chief student affairs officers on recruitment barriers and strategies for students of color at two-year colleges. An urban location, a high percentage of enrolled students of color, and the amount of contact that the chief student affairs officers had with students of color emerged as strong predictors of…

Evaluates whether trends in the prevalence of disability among the aged can be investigated using the 1980 U.S. Census' public transportation question and the 1990 query on mobility limitation. Results suggest that census data may be a suitable data source to study mobility limitation patterns in the small subgroups of the population that are…

Statistical data can be represented in a number of qualitatively different ways, the choice depending on the following three conditions: the concepts to be investigated; the nature of the data; and the purpose for which they were collected. This paper begins by setting out frameworks that describe the nature of statistical thinking in schools, and…

The study describes students' patterns of thinking for statistical problems set in two different contexts. Fifteen students representing a wide range of experiences with high school mathematics participated in problem-solving clinical interview sessions. At one point during the interviews, each solved a problem that involved determining the…

The influence of location as exemplified by neighbourhood factors and school characteristics on primary education is examined in the context of the school choice movement of the last two decades. The analysis incorporates statistical information about schools and population data from Census 2000 describing neighbourhoods and schools in one…

Education improves an individual's and a community's standard of living. In a time when education funding is insufficient for schools to meet high quality standards, principals are in a unique position to influence their community to fully support state and local school budgets. By using data to show education's positive influence on human capital…

The Annual Condition of Education Report provides a wide range of state-level data, including shifts in student populations and demographics, teacher salaries and characteristics, student achievement results, and school financial information. A few examples of the categories presented in this 22nd edition report include: (1) Enrollment; (2) Early…

This report summarizes much of the data collected through the 2005 EDUCAUSE core data survey about campus information technology (IT) environments at 933 colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. The report presents aggregates of data through more than 100 tables and accompanying descriptive text in five areas relevant to planning and…

This study uses Partial Credit Rasch analysis to study a complex data set of student responses to survey items relating to chance and data. The items were administered in the classroom and collected from 1993 to 2003 in the Australian state of Tasmania. Data were collected from a total of 5514 individual students across Grades 3 to 11 over the…

When marking GCSE data handling coursework, the author was repeatedly reminded just how poor the level of statistical understanding is among students. In response to a feeling that the teaching of handling data topics was limited, the author and her colleague designed a project with Y8 students to try to teach statistics for a deeper…

There are now higher than ever numbers of children in public care in the developed world and increasing concerns across Europe to examine the differences in policies and practices and their impact on childrens lives. The small-scale research reported in this paper was commissioned by an agency in the UK concerned with addressing the challenge of…

Understanding that the behavior of people takes place within a context, over the past 20 years research in education and the sport sciences has witnessed an increasing development of multilevel frameworks that are both conceptually and methodologically sound. Despite these advances, the use of multilevel models and research designs in education…

The Foster Care Data Archive is a five-state database that contains foster care career histories for all children who have been placed in a state-supervised substitute-care living arrangement. The Archive was started with five participating states--California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Texas--which together provide services to almost half…