The correlation of student teachers' religiosity with their views on the religious education course that they are called on to teach in Greek public schools is the subject treated in the present survey. The five main features of religiosity, that is, (1) religious faith, (2) religious knowledge, (3) religious experience, (4) participation in a…

A rapidly changing global economy, shifting demographics, and concerns about our ability to maintain a competitive workforce have focused national attention on the educational systems of America's states, highlighting their critical role in ensuring a productive and creative future for our country. As a result, Americas colleges and universities…

Workflow technology has emerged as an eminent way to support scientific computing nowadays. Supported by mature technological infrastructures such as web services and high performance computing infrastructure, workflow technology has been well adopted by scientific community as it offers an effective framework to prototype, modify and manage…

This article discusses how Purdue University is changing the academic behavior of struggling students. At Purdue, they've developed Signals as a means of helping students better understand where they stand gradewise early enough so that they can seek help and raise their grade or drop the course without the penalty of a failing grade. They knew…

Chemistry instructors in teaching laboratories provide expert modeling of techniques and cognitive processes and provide assistance to enrolled students that may be described as scaffolding interaction. Such student support is particularly essential in laboratories taught with an inquiry-based curriculum. In a teaching laboratory with a high…

Affecting university rankings, school reputation, and financial well-being, student retention has become one of the most important measures of success for higher education institutions. From the institutional perspective, improving student retention starts with a thorough understanding of the causes behind the attrition. Such an understanding is…

The demand for graduates with exposure in Cloud Computing is on the rise. For many educational institutions, the challenge is to decide on how to incorporate appropriate cloud-based technologies into their curricula. In this paper, we describe our design and experiences of integrating Cloud Computing components into seven third/fourth-year…

Conventional physics laboratory courses generally include an emphasis on increasing students' ability to carry out data analysis according to scientific practice, in particular, those aspects that relate to measurement uncertainty. This study evaluates the efficacy of the conventional approach by analyzing the understanding of measurement of…

Identifying effective tutorial dialogue strategies is a key issue for intelligent tutoring systems research. Human-human tutoring offers a valuable model for identifying effective tutorial strategies, but extracting them is a challenge because of the richness of human dialogue. This article addresses that challenge through a machine learning…

Data mining and statistical analyses at a less selective institution reveal that the relationships between parents' educational level and some first year success indicators are not linear. Specifically, students who report that either parent or guardian(s) have an educational level beyond a baccalaureate degree or do not report parent education…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents the following articles: (1) Expectations for Assessment Reports: A Descriptive Analysis (Keston H. Fulcher, Matthew Swain, and Chris D. Orem); (2) Editor's Notes: A Surprising Reaction (Trudy W. Banta); (3) Getting SMART with Assessment: ACTION Steps to Institutional Effectiveness (Eric Daffron…

The field of Data Mining like Statistics concerns itself with "learning from data" or "turning data into information". For statisticians the term "Data mining" has a pejorative meaning. Instead of finding useful patterns in large volumes of data as in the case of Statistics, data mining has the connotation of searching for data to fit preconceived…

The efficacy of online learning programs is tied to the suitability of the program in relation to the target audience. Based on the dataset that provides information on student enrollment, academic performance, and demographics extracted from a data warehouse of a large Southwest institution, this study explored the factors that could distinguish…

This report presents the results of an audit by the Office of the Inspector General to determine whether the Department of Education's Office of Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) provided sufficient oversight of graduation and dropout rates submitted by states in their Consolidated State Performance Reports to ensure the rates were…

Researchers are often distressed to discover that the data they wanted to use in their landmark study is not configured in a way that is usable by a Statistical Analysis Software Package (SASP). For example, the data needed may come from two or more sources and it may not be clear to the researcher how to get them combined into one analyzable…