This enlightening handbook offers current, international perspectives on the conditions in communities, contemporary practices in schooling, relevant research on teaching and learning, and implications for the future of education. It contains diverse conceptual frameworks for analyzing existing issues in education, including but not limited to…

Ever so slowly, the United States is taking a harder look at how its teacher preparation schools are improving the quality of the teachers they produce. The signs are everywhere--from proposed federal action to state legislatures and school boards passing new oversight laws and regulations, to a newly marshaled push for stronger accreditation by…

This article charts a strategic research course toward an empirical foundation for the diagnosis of conduct disorder in the forthcoming DSM-V. Since the DSM-IV appeared in 1994, an impressive amount of new information about conduct disorder has emerged. As a result of this new knowledge, reasonable rationales have been put forward for adding to…

In a recent paper, [Kanazawa S. & Kovar J.L. (2004). Why beautiful people are more intelligent, "Intelligence," 32, 227-243] assert that given certain empirical regularities about assortative mating and the heritability of intelligence and beauty, that it logically follows that more intelligent people are more beautiful. It is argued here that…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if Professional Learning Communities in elementary schools that have strong evidence of the five dimensions of a Professional Learning Community have a higher degree of teamness than those schools that do not have strong evidence. Methodology: Using a descriptive and ex post facto study, the…

This study was to determine reliability and validity for a two-tiered, multiple- choice instrument designed to identify alternative conceptions in earth science. Additionally, this study sought to identify alternative conceptions in earth science held by preservice teachers, to investigate relationships between self-reported confidence scores and…

When test forms are administered to examinee groups that differ in proficiency, equating procedures are used to disentangle group differences from form differences. This dissertation investigates the extent to which equating results are population invariant, the impact of group differences on equating results, the impact of group differences on…

The importance of college completion has risen high on the U.S. policy agenda in recent years. An obvious strategy for increasing college completion is improving graduation rates, which for public universities have hovered around 50% for decades. Higher education scholars previously have revealed many student and institutional characteristics…

A study of near-native sentence processing was carried out using the self-paced reading method. Twenty-three near-native speakers of Spanish were identified on the basis of native-like proficiency, age of onset of acquisition after 15 years, and a minimum of three years ongoing residency in Spanish-speaking countries. The sentence comprehension…

This White Paper project was undertaken to address the Learning Disabilities Association of America (LDA) concerns regarding the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA) of 2004 statutory and regulatory requirements for the identification of Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD), and the subsequent U. S. Department of…

The purpose of this report is twofold: first, to introduce the field of digital forensics to professionals in the cultural heritage sector; and second, to explore some particular points of convergence between the interests of those charged with collecting and maintaining born-digital cultural heritage materials and those charged with collecting…

This dissertation presents three research articles in the area of preparing preservice teachers for Virtual Schooling (VS). The context of the dissertation is embedded in a Teacher Education Goes Into Virtual Schooling (TEGIVS) project under the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), U.S. Department of Education. The first…

Scope and Method of Study: The study investigated the relationship between performance on the Oklahoma State Testing Program (OSTP) for grades 3-7 and the EXPLORE in math and reading for 586 students. The EXPLORE test, a part of the ACT, is given in the eighth grade and provides college readiness benchmarks and a national percentile ranking (NPR)…

This report summarises the findings of research commissioned by Universities UK into the role and contribution of higher education in the UK's creative economy. The research gathered evidence from existing data and research as well as case study analysis and contributions from industry, higher education and public sector partners. The findings…

Economic theory commonly models unobserved worker quality as a given parameter that is fixed over time, but empirical evidence supporting this assumption is sparse. In this paper we report on work estimating the stability of value-added estimates of teacher effects, an important area of investigation given that new workforce policies implicitly…