The Lucy Calkins' Reading Units of Study is a literacy curriculum for students in grades K-8. The curriculum has proven to be advantageous for elementary students who have strong reading skills and a broad vocabulary. However, some scholars argue that the curriculum does not meet the needs of students who lack a strong foundation in reading. What…

Research into the history of colonial education in Congo has shown that, for a long time, it was dominated by the idea of gradual development of the masses. Here, the problem of selecting an intellectual elite hardly arose. It was only in the 1950s that a growing number of voices began to clamour for the Congolese to be permitted to study in…

The aim of this research is to identify perceived efficacy of a group of preservice teachers regarding selection of teaching methods and techniques. It seems important for preservice teachers to benefit from teaching methods and techniques in terms of learning processes in different subjects as they practice their profession. As this is a…

Educational expectations are a key predictor of educational attainment. Throughout adolescence, friends increasingly function as 'significant others' and, thus, can affect the development of these expectations. Although scholars often interpret the clustering of students with similar expectations within friendship networks as the outcome of peer…

Our social world is rich with information about other people's choices, which subsequently inform our inferences about their future behavior. For individuals socialized within the American cultural context, which places a high value on autonomy and independence, outcomes that are the result of an agent's own choices may hold more predictive value…

Although choice of task has been effective in reducing noncompliance, it may provide an opportunity to escape from less-preferred tasks. We used a reversal design to evaluate the effects of choice of a low-preference task sequence on noncompliance, task engagement, and duration to complete activities across two individuals with autism spectrum…

We explore the role of defaults and choice architecture on student loan decision-making, experimentally testing the impact pre-populating either decline or accept decisions compared to an active choice, no pre-population, decision. We demonstrate that the default choice presented does influence student loan borrowing decisions. Specifically,…

People draw automatic social inferences from photos of unfamiliar faces and these first impressions are associated with important real-world outcomes. Here we examine the effect of selecting online profile images on first impressions. We model the process of profile image selection by asking participants to indicate the likelihood that images of…

This article shows how statistical matching methods can be used to select "most similar" cases for qualitative analysis. I first offer a methodological justification for research designs based on selecting most similar cases. I then discuss the applicability of existing matching methods to the task of selecting most similar cases and…

Popular culture texts are widely desired by many elementary students, and yet some teachers do not value the use of popular culture texts in the classroom (Lambirth, 2003; Marsh 2006). The purpose of this research was to explore two, Title I elementary teachers' perceptions of the use of popular culture texts during independent reading. Data…

Little is known about how children generate options for taking action in familiar situations or how they select which action option to actually perform. In this article, we explore the interplay between option generation and selection from a developmental perspective using sports as a testbed. In a longitudinal design with four measurement waves,…

This dissertation examined if community college governing board structure and trustee selection influence institutional and student outcomes. This study employed a causal-comparative design and one-way between subjects ANOVA to examine the effects of board structure and trustee selection on the average cost of attendance, graduation rate, and…

Consumption of news media can influence attitudes toward specific groups, but the influence of news media on longitudinal data collection has not yet been researched. We present a method to index media attention on a specific topic, as well as a case study on a big child sexual abuse (CSA) story and its effect on parents' attitudes toward male…

This project examined the effects of two team selection methods (self-selected and instructorformed based on matched academic performance) on team and individual student performance and on self-reported attitudes and team behaviors in a freshman-level core-required introductory course. The data included mid and end-of-semester self-reports.…

Self-assessment and task selection are important self-regulated learning skills for secondary school students. More specifically, selecting new tasks based on self-assessments is very important for them, because teachers are not always present or able to select tasks for them individually. However, little is known about the processes underlying…