Quality of life (QOL) has emerged over the past 20 years as an outcome for measuring the effectiveness of health-improvement interventions. The Cerebral Palsy Quality of Life Questionnaire for Children (CPQOL-Child) is well regarded and now integrated into research internationally. We describe the results of qualitative research, using grounded…

Despite the lack of empirical evidence, the term "foreign language learning disability" (FLLD) has become popular in the learning disabilities (LD) and foreign language literature. I contend that there is not a unique "disability" for foreign language learning and suggest instead that foreign language skills run along a continuum of very strong to…

As the relative level of public support for higher education declines, colleges and universities aim to maximize alumni-giving to keep their programs competitive. Anchored in a utility maximization framework, this study employs the classification and regression tree methodology to examine characteristics of alumni donors and non-donors at a…

In this commentary, the authors discuss some of the issues regarding the use of diagnostic classification models that practitioners should keep in mind. In the authors experience, these issues are not as well known as they should be. The authors then provide recommendations on diagnostic scoring.

Based on extensive literature review, this study reports the result of a meta analysis of learning outcome studies and presents an integrated typology of content types and learning outcomes. Examining the ERIC database for learning studies conducted from 1992 until 2006 shows that most empirical studies have assessed the learning outcome at lower…

The mathematical models of intonation used in speech technology are often inaccessible to linguists. By the same token, phonological descriptions of intonation are rarely used by speech technologists, as they cannot be implemented directly in applications. Consequently, these research communities do not benefit much from each other's insights. In…

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a model for an intertextuality-oriented classification scheme for fiction, to be used by Humanities scholars studying fiction. The methodology used includes a literature review to establish background, followed by the development of a classification scheme by modifying and adding to existing fiction…

Academic programs use objective and standardized assessment criteria. Music education programs have avoided such objective assessments via the assertion of subjectivity and aesthetics in music learning. In this article, the author introduces the revised Bloom's taxonomy as a tool to translate music education outcomes into objective educational…

The paper intends to contribute to the debate on ranking and league tables by adopting a critical approach to ranking methodologies from the point of view of a university benchmarking exercise. The absence of a strict benchmarking exercise in the ranking process has been, in the opinion of the author, one of the major problems encountered in the…

We explore the hypothesis that induction of holistic or analytic strategies influences comprehension and processing of highly contextualized expressions of ordinary language, such as irony. Twenty undergraduate students were asked to categorize as coherent or incoherent a group of sentences. Each sentence completed a previous story, so that they…

Although it is generally accepted that labels facilitate categorization in infancy, recent evidence suggests that infants and young children are more likely to process visual input when presented in isolation than when paired with nonlinguistic sounds or linguistic labels. These findings suggest that auditory input (when compared to a no-auditory…

Two studies were conducted to evaluate interventions, based upon the extended contact hypothesis and multiple classification skills training, which aimed to promote children's positive intergroup attitudes towards two stigmatized groups. Study 1 tested whether extended contact and multiple classification skills training changed out-group attitudes…

Educational accommodations for students with vision impairments are alterations in the way that an assessment or a test is administered. These alterations are not made to give the student an advantage, but to level the playing field with sighted peers. The authors provide for the educational practitioner a taxonomy of these types of accommodation…

Little is known about the organization, characteristics or services offered by academic interdisciplinary gerontology centers located in higher education institutions. This article presents a description and an emerging typology of academic interdisciplinary gerontology centers based on information collected from the Websites of 47 centers. The…

It has been suggested that iconic graphical signs evolve into symbolic graphical signs through repeated usage. This article reports a series of interactive graphical communication experiments using a "pictionary" task to establish the conditions under which the evolution might occur. Experiment 1 rules out a simple repetition based account in…