Surveys are typical for student evaluation of teaching (SET). Survey research consistently confirms the negative impacts of careless responses on research validity, including low data quality and invalid research inferences. SET literature seldom addresses if careless responses are present and how to improve. To improve evaluation practices and…

Reform efforts in statistics education emphasize the need for students to develop statistical thinking. Critical to this goal is a solid understanding of design in the process of collecting data, evaluating evidence, and drawing conclusions. We collected survey responses from over 700 college students at the start of an introductory statistics…

Institutional researchers are often tasked with assessing why college-wide initiatives succeed or fail. This can be a difficult task: researchers need to discriminate between multiple feasible explanations, work with limited data, and produce compelling narratives. Process tracing is a qualitative methodology that enables researchers to make valid…

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (Raue & Lewis, 2011), students with disabilities (SWD) attend postsecondary education at rates similar to their peers without disabilities. However, graduation rates from postsecondary educational settings for SWD are disparate from those of their counterparts without disabilities.…

This pan Canadian participatory action research project involved faculty and managers in twelve Canadian colleges and institutes, nine employers, and 1300 students and workers in examining exemplary practice in essential skills as a way of catalyzing system change. Multiple sources of data were used in the three year project and key findings…

The most widely cited statistics on postsecondary students with disabilities in the United States are based on the Department of Education's quadrennial National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS). However, these statistics are called into question by their substantial variability across NPSAS administrations and by results of the second…

Summative student evaluation of teaching (SET) is a contentious process, but given the increasing emphasis on quality and accountability, as well as national and international calls for centralised student feedback systems, is likely to become an inevitable aspect of teaching. This research aimed to clarify academics' attitudes to SET in a large…

Districts now have access to a wealth of new information that can help target students with appropriate supports and bring focus and coherence to college readiness efforts. However, the abundance of data has brought its own challenges. Schools and school systems are often overwhelmed with the amount of data available. The capacity of districts to…

The constructs of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) have been used extensively to investigate learner performance on second language tasks. However, a serious concern is that the variables used to measure these constructs are sometimes used conventionally without any empirical justification. It is crucial for researchers to understand how…

In late 2007, the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC) expanded its Enrollment Reporting service to include several additional data elements (commonly referred to as the "A2" or "expanded" data elements). One of these expanded data elements is student gender. Although gender is potentially important to a number of research…

This article critically reviews empirical correlates of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 (MMPI-2; Butcher, Dahlstrom, Graham, Tellegen, & Kaemmer, 1989), based on several validation studies conducted with different racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. A major critique of the reviewed MMPI-2 studies was focused on the use of…

Student evaluations of teaching are ubiquitous and impactful on the careers of college teachers. However, there is limited empirical research documenting the accuracy of people's efforts in interpreting teaching evaluations. The current research consisted of three studies documenting the effect of small mean differences in teaching…

Decades of research in survey methodology and psychology have yielded important insights about how to create effective and valid survey instruments. As Porter (in press) has argued convincingly, college student surveys often fall well short of these standards by placing unrealistic demands on students' memory and by assuming that students readily…

The Particulate Nature of Matter and Chemical Bonding Diagnostic Instrument (Othman J., Treagust D. F. and Chandrasegaran A. L., (2008), "Int. J. Sci. Educ.," 30(11), 1531-1550) is used to investigate college students' understanding of two chemistry concepts: particulate nature of matter and chemical bonding. The instrument, originally…

We analyzed over 100,000 student evaluations of instruction over 4 years in the college of business at a major public university. We found that the original instrument that was validated about 20 years ago is still valid, with factor analysis showing that the six underlying dimensions used in the instrument remained relatively intact. Also, we…