Statistical investigations, a thread within the statistics strand of the mathematics and statistics learning area (Ministry of Education, 2007), are underpinned by the statistical enquiry cycle. As teachers introduce their students to the statistical enquiry cycle, they are supporting their students to become data detectives, posing and answering…

Using data from a random sample of first-year students in the 2009 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), we compared engagement in educationally purposeful activities in college, a set of educational outcomes, and the relationship between student engagement and educational outcomes for nonathletes and student-athletes participating in low-…

Current understandings suggest that three aspects of writing practice underpin the research student publication process: knowledge creation, text production and identity formation. Publishing a literature review is the first opportunity most students have to publish. This article compares the pedagogical benefits of different literature review…

A study at the University of Tennessee Knoxville used mixed-effect structural equation models incorporating latent variables as an alternative to conventional methods of analyzing college students' (n=722) first-year-to-senior academic gains. Results indicate, contrary to previous analysis, that coursework and student characteristics interact to…

A study compared three methods for measuring college student growth and development in the course of a college education: (1) gain scores; (2) residual scores; and (3) repeated measures. Analyses indicated that all three are seriously flawed, although repeated measures offer the greatest potential for adequately representing student change.…

Analysis of data on freshman-to-senior developmental gains in 722 University of Tennessee-Knoxville students provides evidence of the advantages of structural equation modeling with latent variables and suggests that the group differences identified by traditional analysis of variance and covariance techniques may be an artifact of measurement…