This research aims to build economic research skills and stimulate students' interest in the local economy through data-based undergraduate research in entry-level economics courses. The authors developed two assignments and one student survey assessing students' learning outcomes and implemented them in two introductory-level classes from fall…

Background: Like other professional training programs, social work pedagogy has long recognized the value of experiential learning for professional development. Despite social work's rich experiential learning literature involving field education, direct practice courses, and program evaluation, there is a dearth of literature examining how to…

The ratings given by citizens to local public schools in the United States have been rising in the last decades. Using national public opinion surveys, this study seeks to understand the determinants of public evaluations of local schools across time. Aggregate trend analyses indicate that public evaluations of local schools are influenced not…

During recent years, we have seen an increase in the complexity of school leadership as knowledge work. The new forms of knowledge available to school leadership, such as performance data and survey-based data, raise the expectation that leaders make relevant use of these knowledge resources. Theory and policy claim that new knowledge is of…

Using the notion that research should "enlighten" policy responses, this paper considers the complex locational factors that affect and underlie patterns of Indigenous student mobility in Queensland, Australia. The paper presents data, captured through an action research project, to explore mobility "in and through" two…

This ex post facto, causal-comparative research study examined student reading performance data within a school district before and after a school district-wide decision to alter the reading curriculum in response to local political pressure from parents. Data analysis revealed that test scores dropped to a significantly lower level, especially…

This study analyzes and describes the links between the curriculum policies of one urban school district in the US and an intervention by the economics firm Standard & Poor's (S&P). It characterizes the languages and values introduced to the district leadership by S&P as ideologically neoliberal. This school-level case study that makes…

Three conceptual approaches to estimating local child abuse rates using the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect data set are evaluated. All three approaches yield estimates of actual abuse cases that exceed the number of reported cases. (SLD)

To shed light on the prevalance of families choosing one residential area over another on the basis of the quality of schools in each area, the article explores whether a geography of intelligence exists in a small Kentucky town of approximately 20,000 people. Findings indicated significant spatial associations among IQ, achievement, and…

Voters in five states approved referenda making English their official language. The vote is used to assess racial, ethnic, economic, political, and cultural hypotheses. The racial and cultural hypotheses are not validated; the ethnic and class ones are partially supported; and the political hypothesis offers the most compelling explanation. (26…

Reports on a study of innovative city and county government programs in four western states. The study discovered widely divergent assessments of the same programs, dependent upon whether the survey instruments used qualitative or quantitative techniques. Discusses the possible reasons for this and the implications for future research. (MJP)