For thousands of years Jewish law was based on revelation and precedent. God's will, as revealed in scripture, was determinative: it demarcated what was permitted, required and prohibited. A contemporary rabbi could offer only a slight emendation of precedents. The early modern period, however, witnessed a dramatic shift in Jewish norm-making. A…

Physics is one of the least diverse disciplines amongst the natural sciences. Large-scale studies, such as those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have indicated that students from underrepresented and racially minoritized groups score below students from dominant groups, and female students are typically outperformed by their…

This article proposes a Boolean approach to representing and analyzing interobserver agreement in dichotomous coding. Building on the notion that observations are samples of a universe of observations, it submits that coding can be viewed as a process in which observers sample pieces of evidence on constructs. It distinguishes between formal and…

The disproportionate discipline of students of color leads to many negative outcomes. The use of exclusionary school discipline contributes to this problem. This form of discipline has been shown to make students feel socially isolated and to prevent them from making academic progress. The causes of the disproportionate discipline of students of…

Despite a variety of definitions of mindfulness, over the past 20 years there have been increasing claims that mindful practice is helpful in improving the accuracy of clinical diagnosis. We performed a systematic review and evidence synthesis in order to: determine the nature and definitions of mindful practice and associated terms; evaluate the…

Success for All (SFA) is a school improvement project promoted by the team of Professor Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University. This paper reviewed the development process of SFA and analyzed its characteristics. By comparing with China's "New Basic Education" project, we summarized the reference value of SFA for China, and further…

Background: The measurement of equality is often difficult for groups who are weakly defined or poorly represented in official datasets. Social statistics are an essential component in rights recognition and advocacy because they make protected groups of persons visible and reveal the extent of their inequalities in comparison with population…

Children's naive theories include misconceptions which can interfere with science learning. This research examined the effect of pairing anomalies with alternative theories, and their order of presentation, on children's belief revision. Children believe that heavy objects sink and light ones float. In a pre-, mid-, and post-test design,…

Background: Academic research on technical advice to policy commonly focuses on social and related policy areas such as health, education and crime (Oliver et al. 2014) and disciplinary advice from science disciplines (Jasanoff 1994; Millstone and van Zwanenberg 2001). Little or no prior research in the social sciences have explored engineering…

Network meta-analysis (NMA) compares the efficacy and harm between several treatments by combining direct and indirect evidence. The validity of NMA requires that all available evidence form a coherent network. Failure to meet such requirement is known as inconsistency. The most popular approach to inconsistency detection is to compare the direct…

The goal of this brief is to provide school district and school staff with tools to help make more effective and efficient use of resources, particularly American Rescue Plan ESSER III funding. ESSER III funding offers districts and schools an opportunity to not only support their immediate needs of safely reopening schools to in-person…

This Report by Nicola Dandridge considers the different approaches taken by higher education institutions, students, academics and policymakers towards the relationship between teaching and research. It notes how frequently the concept of research-informed teaching is invoked, yet how obscurely it is implemented. The relationship appears to mean…

Background: Evidence should guide decisions in aphasia practice across the continuum of stroke care; however, evidence-practice gaps persist. This is particularly pertinent in the acute setting where 30% of people with stroke will have aphasia, and speech pathologists experience many challenges implementing evidence-based practice. This has…

Modern societies need higher education systems that are strongly grounded on scientific knowledge and evidence-based teaching tools. This laboratory-based study extended Chase and Houmanfar (2009), examining the effects of basic and elaborate feedback on participants' performance measured with two sets of tests administered after a college-level…

Since the advent of the twenty-first century, science has experienced a crisis pertaining to the replicability of quantitative research findings, which has become known as the 'replication crisis'. The replication crisis has particularly afflicted research in the behavioural sciences, and psychology in particular. Given the relevance of psychology…