Introduces five papers concerning speech acts in world Englishes in which it is agreed that conversational interactions in indigenized varieties of English, whether in literary works or in real life, are different compared to the native varieties, and, in some sense, represent a cross-cultural phenomenon. (GLR)

Examines several areas to contribute to the development of a poetry therapy practice research model: research models, specificity and replication, poetry selection, studies in practice research, professional issues, and the identification of directions for future research. (SR)

Examined work that appeared in the "Review of Educational Research" (RER) since its first volume to explore the ways that educational issues and educational research found their ways into the journal and to consider what a review really is. Identifies three periods in the history of RER and shows changes in the review genre over time.…

Describes the early stages of development of the Campbell Collaboration Social, Psychological, Educational & Criminological Trials Register (C2-SPECTR) to help those preparing and maintaining systematic reviews of experiments in these fields. The register currently contains more than 10,000 records, including more than 300 references to existing…

Article discusses the role that negative results or "no-difference" findings play in research and research reviews of empirically supported interventions in school psychology. Argues for publication of these findings in school psychology journals when they occur in the context of development of empirically supported interventions and…

Proposes and illustrates a new method by which "what if" analyses can be conducted using estimated true population effects. Use of these "what if" methods may prevent authors with large sample sizes from overinterpreting their small effects once they see that the small effects would no longer have been statistically significant with only a…

Reviewed the "Journal of Counseling Psychology,""Psychology & Aging," and "Professional Psychology: Research and Practice" for their practices regarding the reporting of reliability coefficients from 1990 to 1997. In two of the three journals, there was little change in reporting reliability coefficients during…

Provides abstracts of nine research papers presented at the 2001 Agricultural Communication in Education annual conference. Includes papers on food safety, critical thinking, distance education, information technologies, agricultural news sources, and genetically engineered foods. (JOW)

Discusses four reasons for promoting the use of confidence intervals: (1) ease of interpretation; (2) links with familiar statistical tests; (3) promotion of meta-analytic thinking; and (4) increase of information about precision. Discusses calculations of confidence intervals for a basic standardized effect size measure and discusses software for…

General intelligence has been the most commonly studied neuropsychological characteristic of sexual offenders for over 70 years. Results, however, have been highly inconsistent. To assess whether sexual offenders score lower in IQ than nonsexual offenders and to explore which sexual offense characteristics relate to IQ, the authors reanalyzed all…

The use of systematic reviews in educational research is a growing phenomenon in the UK, but is highly controversial. This article argues that such reviews have a useful place in a research cycle that wishes to inform and be informed by practice and policy. It proposes and discusses a model of educational research, showing how reviews relate to…

This article analyzes the power of ambiguous metaphors to present scientific novelty. Its focus is a series of papers by the prominent population biologist W. D. Hamilton in which he redefined the meaning of biological altruism. In particular, the article draws on Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad to examine why suggestions of motive are so…

The powerful, reciprocal connection between school and housing segregation has long been recognized. The housing-school link was a key element in both the 1968 Kerner Commission Report and in the legislative history of the Fair Housing Act. The relation of school and housing segregation was also explored in a series of school desegregation cases…

Researchers have begun tracking a group of high ability high school students from high school into college study. These students indicated an interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) content areas, and specifically ocean sciences, through participation in a regional or national academic competition in high school--The…

A new report finds that all states and the District of Columbia have now ushered in new English-language-proficiency tests to comply with No Child Left Behind Act requirements for those still learning the language. The report, "English Language Proficiency Assessment in the Nation: Current Status and Future Practice," released by the University of…