Based on quantitative survey data and qualitative data from journal entries by students in a seminar focused on community-based research, undergraduate student perceptions of community partners are explored in the context of debates about the politics of knowledge. Student perceptions that frame community partners as the recipients of academic…

In this article, we outline the challenges facing French Studies in regional Australian universities resulting from an increasingly vocational curriculum and doubts about the cost-effectiveness of language learning in higher education. These pressures have resulted in a process of discipline restructuring and significant cuts in the numbers of…

The Children's Hand-Skill ability Questionnaire (CHSQ) is a new parent-report questionnaire that assesses children's manual ability in three domains: leisure and play, school/education, and activities of daily living. The CHSQ can be used with children presenting with a range of disabilities and works as a companion assessment before detailed…

The purpose of this study was to develop and test the construct validity and reliability of a self-report measure of self-regulated practice behaviors for beginning and intermediate instrumentalists. A questionnaire was designed to assess the motive, method, behavior, time management, and social influences dimensions of the theoretical model of…

This study examined whether attitude toward writing is a unique and separable construct from attitude toward reading for young beginning writers. Participants were 128 first-grade children (70 girls and 58 boys) and 113 third-grade students (57 girls and 56 boys). We individually administered to each child a 24-item attitude measure that contained…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of what the author believes to be his major contributions to the field of Educational Administration. Design/methodology/approach: The approach taken is a personal review and reflection based on research. For purposes of structuring the article three themes have been…

Context: A concept map is a graphical and cognitive tool that enables learners to link together interrelated concepts using propositions or statements that answer a posed problem. As an assessment tool, concept mapping reveals a learner's research skill proficiency and cognitive processing. Background: The identification and organization of the…

Previous research suggests that elementary teachers vary in their enactment of science curriculum materials and may not always engage students in substantive sense making. This mixed-methods study investigates elementary teachers' use of science curriculum materials to engage students in the scientific practice of comparing and evaluating…

Scotland, in common with many other countries internationally, has paid considerable attention to the development of assessment for learning. Currently, schools in Scotland are engaged in a major programme of curriculum and assessment reform, entitled Curriculum for Excellence. As part of the reform process, there is concern amongst practitioners,…

This brief considers the problem of using value-added scores to compare teachers who work in different schools. The author focuses on whether such comparisons can be regarded as fair, or, in statistical language, "unbiased." An unbiased measure does not systematically favor teachers because of the backgrounds of the students they are…

Calls for evidence-based reform of teacher preparation programs (TPPs) suggest the question: Do the current indicators of progress and performance used by TPPs predict effectiveness of their graduates when they become teachers? In this study, the indicators of progress and performance used by one program are examined for their ability to predict…

In this study, we tested whether 8-month-old infants could infer an actor's unfulfilled goal, despite some physical information present in the displays being inconsistent with the attempted goal. Infants saw a human hand holding a ring repeatedly approach the top of a plastic cone in an apparent failed attempt to place the ring on the cone. The…

Under certain conditions, statistical evidence is more persuasive than anecdotal evidence in supporting a claim about the probability that a certain event will occur. In three experiments, it is shown that the type of argument is an important condition in this respect. If the evidence is part of an argument by generalization, statistical evidence…

In recent years, federal, state, and local governments and other funding organizations have increased pressure for greater effectiveness and accountability of prevention programs, including those oriented toward families. This rising demand for program accountability has fueled a growing interest in evidence-based programs. Drawing on what is…

The importance of higher education has never been clearer. Educational attainment--the number of years a person spends in school--strongly predicts adult earnings, as well as health and civic engagement. Yet relative to other developed nations, educational attainment in the United States is lagging, with young Americans who heretofore led the…