This study evaluated the impact of housing services among child welfare-involved families using observational data. Propensity score matching with data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being compared intact families (n = 183) who received housing services 12 months after initial investigation to nontreated families balanced on…

Parson's programming puzzles are a family of code construction assignments where lines of code are given, and the task is to form the solution by sorting and possibly selecting the correct code lines. We introduce a novel family of Parson's puzzles where the lines of code need to be sorted in two dimensions. The vertical dimension is used to order…

Children are ubiquitous imitators, but how do they decide which actions to imitate? One possibility is that children rationally combine multiple sources of information about which actions are necessary to cause a particular outcome. For instance, children might learn from contingencies between action sequences and outcomes across repeated…

Many schools are implementing multitier response-to-intervention (RTI) models to reduce reading difficulties. This study was part of our larger ongoing longitudinal RTI investigation within the Florida Learning Disabilities Center grant and was conducted in 7 ethnically and socioeconomically diverse schools. We observed reading instruction in 20…

The process of taking a high-stakes test stretches well beyond the day of the test itself; indeed, months may be spent preparing for such a test. Strategy research has proved to be a fruitful means of investigating the test-taking process, but it has typically relied on only one research approach at one contact point. This study explores three…

This paper provides an auto-ethnography or narrative of self related to the development of international experiential education programmes in nature developed by Vacation School Lipnice (VSL) in the Czech Republic. The paper provides the cultural background that influences the course design and provides examples, through participant observation,…

Drawing on data from three English classrooms at two Chinese universities, this paper documents the turn-taking patterns that the teachers and students developed over time and explores how these patterns affected students' opportunities to participate in classroom discourse. The data were collected through observations, audio- and video-taping,…

Early social withdrawal and protective parenting predict a host of negative outcomes, warranting examination of their development. Mothers' accurate anticipation of their toddlers' fearfulness may facilitate transactional relations between toddler fearful temperament and protective parenting, leading to these outcomes. Currently, we followed 93…

The purpose of this study was to better understand teacher tensions in professional development. The population under study was practicing mathematics teachers engaged in a week-long professional development institute. Data sources included observations, interviews, and teacher products (such as registration forms, surveys, journals, and…

Current standards of data presentation and analysis in biological journals often fall short of ideal. This is the first of a planned series of short articles, to be published in a number of journals, aiming to highlight the principles of clear data presentation and appropriate statistical analysis. This article considers the methods used to show…

Field experiments are at the core of ecology, yet rarely find their way into education, probably due to a combination of technical challenges and risks associated with fieldwork. This may compromise student education and perception of the subject, making interesting, readily manageable experiments extremely important. We describe how the daily…

A science teacher educator returned to teaching adolescents after more than 10 years in the professoriate. We studied his beliefs, practice and daily use of inquiry pedagogy while implementing a reform-based curriculum. Reflection on practice was evidenced by a weekly journal, classroom observations and debriefings, and extensive interviews. Newly…

The present study examined the growth of receptive lexical skills in preschoolers over an academic year in relation to teacher speech. The participating students were English language learners and their monolingual English-speaking peers from the same classrooms. The measures of teacher input included indicators of the amount of speech (total…

Signal detection theory forms the core of many current models of cognition, including memory, choice, and categorization. However, the classic signal detection model presumes the a priori existence of fixed stimulus representations--usually Gaussian distributions--even when the observer has no experience with the task. Furthermore, the classic…

In science education in the Netherlands new, context-based, curricula are being developed. As in any innovation, the outcome will largely depend on the teachers who design and implement lessons. Central to the study presented here is the idea that teachers, when designing lessons, use rules-of-thumb: notions of what a lesson should look like if…