It is curious that so many people are accepting of statistics despite Disraeli's famous aphorism concerning "three kinds of lies." This acceptance certainly seems to hold for education statistics, especially when they imply something negative about American public schools. Sometimes people accept statistics because they are not in a position to…

The author describes four capacities--interpretation, instrumentation, interaction, and inner direction--that are as important as traditional academic subjects in preparing young adults for college and career success. He suggests how high schools should address each of these capacities. For example, to develop students' capacity for inner…

Despite the role that institutional service plays in the tenure and promotion process, quantitative research in this area has focused on the percentage of time spent on service and administration, with little research on specific aspects of faculty service. Committee work, one of the most important parts of faculty service, has been particularly…

In this case study, based on the reported rediscovery of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker in April 2005, students examine a real-world example of the scientific process and explore the practical implications of their conclusions. The case tells the story of Brad Murky, a student and research assistant who must decide whether the available evidence is…

Despite the best of intentions, qualitative researchers can be faced, in some circumstances, with having to make meaning from thin, or less than optimal, data. Using a real study as context, the authors describe the ways that they made sense of their thin data on teachers' perceptions of a large-scale evaluation instrument. They propose a…

This paper presents empirical findings from a 10-year longitudinal study of the educational and occupational socialization of 445 participants who were about 7 years old when first tested, and about 17 years old at the fourth time of measurement. In addition to collecting psychological measurements from the participants, behavioral reports were…

The New Media Consortium's Horizon Project is an ongoing research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact in education and other industries around the world over a five-year time period. The chief products of the project are the "Horizon Reports", an annual series of publications…

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…

Recent research suggests that the examination of students' work may lead to changes in teaching practice that are more effective in terms of students' mathematical learning. However, the link between the examination of students' work and the teachers' actions in the classroom is largely unexamined, particularly at the secondary level. In this…

Reporting and interpreting (corrected) effect size indices can help readers of scientific reports understand the importance of those results more fully instead of just determining the likelihood of results assuming the null hypothesis. This study explored the frequency of effect reporting and interpretation in quantitative studies in Communication…

This guide provides students with practice for all the major types of graphs they are likely to encounter. It includes information on graphs of various families of algebraic functions; bar, line, and circle graphs; the creation, reading, and interpretation of graphs; and the use of graphing calculators. (MVL)

Presents two viewpoints about the use and interpretability of beta weights in educational research: (1) that beta weights should be interpreted as a logical index of the importance of individual predictors within the context of the entire set of predictors; and (2) that interpretation requires certain cautions and conditions. (SV)

A procedure is presented to transform an n-dimensional scatter diagram into a two-dimensional scatter diagram while preserving proximity relationships between points. This procedure can help in the presentation and interpretation of multivariate results. (Author/SLD)

This study was an attempt to replicate a previously reported quantitative trait loci association between general cognitive ability and a marker identified as EST00083 (P. Skuder et al., 1995). The association remained significant for 51 high and 51 average IQ child subjects but not for 40 extremely high and 50 average IQ subjects. Implications are…

Provides information regarding the National Educational Longitudinal Study database that was used for many of the studies in this volume. Provides relevant background and instructions so that others may use this resource from the National Center for Education Statistics. (Author/EV)