Since 1983, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy has conducted applied research as a nonpartisan agency of the state legislature. Over the years, discussions in the state have turned toward emphasizing "evidence-based" programs and policies in decision making, and research requests of the legislature have evolved to reflect…

The current meta-analysis study summarizes the effects of the GlobalEd Project, a web-based educational intervention of international negotiations embedded within social studies curricula, on middle and high school students' interest in social studies and negotiation self efficacy. Meta-analytic evidence supports statistically significant…

Transition from primary to secondary school is an important but neglected topic. For this review, 88 studies were selected from 325 possible studies, as including substantive data related to transition. The teacher's perspective and the child's perspective were very different, the former principally concerned with attainment and the latter…

This research study employs a second-order meta-analysis procedure to summarize 40 years of research activity addressing the question, does computer technology use affect student achievement in formal face-to-face classrooms as compared to classrooms that do not use technology? A study-level meta-analytic validation was also conducted for purposes…

Higher education research has long relied on Classical Test Theory (CTT) principles, despite compelling arguments made by measurement theorists that suggest CTT techniques make a number of erroneous assumptions. Many measurement theorists argue Item Response Theory (IRT) techniques overcome many of CTTs deficiencies and lead to more valid and…

This study reports the results of a meta-analysis of 44 studies that examined the impacts of participation in challenge (ropes) course activities. Overall, a medium standardized mean difference effect size was found (d = 0.43). Effect sizes were calculated for various study characteristics, including demographics and outcome. Higher effects were…

Background: Most classroom observation studies have documented significant deficiencies in the classroom attention of children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) compared to their typically developing peers. The magnitude of these differences, however, varies considerably and may be influenced by contextual, sampling, diagnostic,…

Syntheses of research on educational programs have taken on increasing policy importance. Procedures for performing such syntheses must therefore produce reliable, unbiased, and meaningful information on the strength of evidence behind each program. Because evaluations of any given program are few in number, syntheses of program evaluations must…

This study examines the association between marital quality and personal well-being using meta-analytic techniques. Effects from 93 studies were analyzed. The average weighted effect size r was 0.37 for cross-sectional and 0.25 for longitudinal effects. Results indicate that several variables moderate the association between marital quality and…

Socio-scientific issues have become increasingly important in Science-Technology-Society (STS) education as a means to make science learning more relevant to students' lives. This study used the e-waste issue as a context to investigate two aspects of socio-scientific decision-making: (1) the relationship between the nature of science (NOS)…

The number of deaf education teacher preparation programs and the number of program graduates were tabulated from reference issues of the "American Annals of the Deaf" beginning in 1973 and progressing every third year through 2009. Programs and graduates reached their highest levels from the mid-1970s through mid-1980s. In 2006 and…

This paper presents the analysis of two representative lessons drawn from a cross case study of K-12 classrooms in which students and their teachers engaged in a collaborative dialogic inquiry process (data-driven dialogue) to co-construct meaning from assessment results. The representative lessons illustrate a significant shift from…

The purpose of this synthesis was to examine the relationship between Curriculum-Based Measurement (CBM) and statewide achievement tests in reading. A multilevel meta-analysis was used to calculate the correlation coefficient of the population for 27 studies that met the inclusion criteria. Results showed an overall large correlation coefficient…

Actuarial risk assessment tools are used extensively to predict future violence, but previous studies comparing their predictive accuracies have produced inconsistent findings as a result of various methodological issues. We conducted meta-analyses of the effect sizes of 9 commonly used risk assessment tools and their subscales to compare their…

This paper explores the use of videoconferencing as used in English schools, drawing on data collected over seven years from a number of funded and unfunded projects. A common theme emerging from across these investigations is that the educational use of videoconferencing technology in schools is not a unitary phenomenon. Rather, different…