Proposes hermeneutical inquiry as suitable to the study of several aspects of career counseling, including career as a life-span project. Addresses three specific steps of hermeneutical inquiry: the recognition of the researcher's initial framework, the identification of the actor's framework, and the construction of the interpretation. Argues…

Discusses problems researchers face when they want to describe relationship between several predictors and criterion variable. Considers ways of addressing problem of contribution of each predictor depending on which other predictors are in regression equation. Focuses on parallel information for each variable, examining initial and final…

This article discusses and illustrates the three ways by which information from a multiple response questionnaire can be analyzed, its impact on the resulting summary tables, and the implications for the interpretation of survey results. It also underscores the importance of communicating with a data analyst during the questionnaire design phase.…

Applies Latour's notion of graphism to the hierarchy of sciences. Finds that the use of graphs across seven scientific disciplines correlates almost perfectly with their hardness, and that the same pattern held up across 10 specialty fields in psychology. (Author/CCM)

School improvement without will and moral purpose--without a genuine commitment to all students--is an empty exercise in compliance that, in the authors' experience, can do more harm than good. The authors have seen educators use data to "more accurately" track students, further widening the opportunity-to-learn gap. In response to achievement…

An analysis of survey data is used to examine the practices used to hire teachers, the level of principal autonomy within the process, the attributes sought in teachers, and to compare each based upon the characteristics of schools and of principals. Findings indicate that urban and low-performing schools (and the principals of these schools) are…

The comparability of examinations in different subjects has been a controversial topic for many years and a number of criticisms have been made of statistical approaches to estimating the "difficulties" of achieving particular grades in different subjects. This paper argues that if comparability is understood in terms of a linking…

In the United States, when English language learners (ELLs) are tested, they are usually tested in English and their limited English proficiency is a potential cause of construct-irrelevant variance. When such irrelevancies affect test scores, inaccurate interpretations of ELLs' knowledge, skills, and abilities may occur. In this article, we…

In this article, a practical demonstration suitable for any biology college classroom is presented. With the examples of a complex biological specimen (slug's radula) and a simple reference specimen (electron microscopical grid imprint in gelatin), both of which can be easily prepared, the capabilities of two imaging modes commonly used in optical…

Mathematics and statistics play important roles in peoples' lives today. A day hardly passes that they are not bombarded with many different kinds of statistics. As consumers they see statistical information as they surf the web, watch television, listen to their satellite radios, or even read the nutrition facts panel on a cereal box in the…

People often make interpretations when they believe they are providing factual descriptions. To demonstrate unintentional interpretation, the author showed a brief ambiguous video clip and asked students to write descriptions of what they saw and heard. When students evaluated their responses, they discovered that 96% of the class wrote…

A long-standing issue in the study of how people acquire visual information centers around the scheduling and deployment of attentional resources: Is the process serial, or is it parallel? A substantial empirical effort has been dedicated to resolving this issue. However, the results remain largely inconclusive because the methodologies that have…

Over the past 25 years, meta-analysis has assumed a significant role in the synthesis of counseling and psychotherapy research through the evaluation and interpretation of the results of multiple studies. An examination of four widely recognized rehabilitation counseling journals, however, reveals that only one meta-analysis (Bolton & Akridge,…

Surprising downshifts from more preferred (training incentive) to less preferred incentives (test incentive) are usually accompanied by emotional activation and suppression of conditioned behavior in rats. Two experiments were designed to determine whether consummatory behavior is similarly affected by downshifts of equal proportions. Within…

Outliers, extreme data values relative to others in a sample, may distort statistics that assume internal levels of measurement and normal distribution. The outlier may be a valid value or an error. Several procedures are available for identifying outliers, and each may be applied to errors of prediction from the regression lines for utility in a…