The reading, analyzing and critiquing of primary literature in both writing and oral forms are daunting tasks for science undergraduates. These activities are recognized as skills that science undergraduates should develop in order to improve their scientific communication abilities.

School vouchers, particularly since the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Cleveland program, are one of the most contentious issues in American education. Seemingly contradictory results across available studies have caused confusion among diverse audiences. The authors suggest that these divergent findings are, in part, due to three…

The present study used data from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2003 to look at the trend in instructional strategies in science teaching and its effect on the science achievement. Based on the analysis, the strategies used by most science teachers were demonstration, practical work and the lecture method. Among…

Statistical literacy is defined as "the ability to read and interpret data: the ability to use statistics as evidence in arguments. Statistical literacy is a competency: the ability to think critically about statistics" (Schield, p. 2). When a definition of statistical literacy is considered it can be seen that all students can manage a…

Education policy discussions often assume that public school teachers are poorly paid. Typically absent in these discussions about teacher pay, however, is any reference to systematic data on how much public school teachers are actually paid, especially relative to other occupations. Because discussions about teacher pay rarely reference these…

Global economic transformations have never been as dramatic as in the twentieth century. Most countries have experienced radical changes in the standards of income per capita, technology, fertility, mortality, income inequality and the extent of democracy in the course of the past century. It is the goal of many disciplines--economics, history,…

Although most school districts and schools are routinely involved in data collection, they do not typically use the data they collect in a systematic fashion to identify strengths and weaknesses and develop improvement strategies. One reason for the lack of data use is the perception that the data are being collected for someone else's purposes.…

In this age of proliferating visual communications, there is a permissiveness in subject matter, content, and meaning that is exhilarating, yet overwhelming to interpret in a meaningful or consensual way. By recognizing visual statements, whether a piece of sculpture, an advertisement, a video, or a building, as communication, one can approach…

When conducting a two-year college program review, there are several advantages to supplementing the standard quantitative research approach with qualitative measures. Qualitative research does not depend on a large number of random samples, it uses a flexible design which can be refined as the research is executed, and it generates findings in a…

When the Educational Testing Service became the administrator of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 1983, it introduced scales based on item response theory (IRT) as a way of presenting results of the assessment to the general public. Some properties of the scales and their uses are discussed. Initial attempts at presenting…

Monte Carlo studies of statistical tests are prominently featured in the methodological research literature. Unfortunately, the information from these studies does not appear to have significantly influenced methodological practice in educational and psychological research. One reason is that Monte Carlo studies lack an overarching theory to guide…

Paralleling the interest among researchers in naturalistic inquiry is a resurgence in action research, and particularly in research which involves the collaboration of researchers and research subjects. This paper locates the negotiation of research outcomes between researcher and subject on a continuum, with the separation of researcher and…

A common problem in the behavioral sciences is to determine if a set of observed variables can be more parsimoniously represented by a smaller set of derived variables. To address this problem, the performance of five methods for determining the number of components to retain (Horn's parallel analysis, Velicer's Minimum Average Partial (MAP),…

This report analyzes possible causes of current trends in educational achievement and discusses implications for policy. It uses data described in the publication "Trends in Educational Achievement," a Congressional Budget Office study released in April 1986, which assessed data about trends in test scores. This report begins with a…

The influence of biological science research on the development of physical education curriculum is examined in this paper. The social construction of scientific knowledge is described as occurring in the selection of problems to be studied, the collection and interpretation of data, the dissemination of results, and the educational uses of…