In this study, educators' requests for foundation grant funding to purchase desired educational materials or services were examined. Specifically, this study sought to review to what extent, and in what manner, educators utilize research and other forms of evidence to support their decision making. Data analysis revealed several themes. Although…

This study investigated differences in self-efficacy to teach literacy between two groups of pre-service teachers. The authors hypothesized that pre-service teachers enrolled in one program focusing on fewer grade levels (K-3) and requiring more literacy-focused courses would have higher self-efficacy than pre-service teachers enrolled in another…

Comparisons of literary experts and novices indicate that experts engage in interpretive processes to "get the point" during their reading of literary texts but novices do not. In two studies the reading and interpretive processes of literary novices (undergraduates with no formal training in literature study) were elicited through…

Using a Chinese Word Associates Test (WAT-C), this study examined the vocabulary depth of second language learners of Chinese and its contribution to the learners' reading comprehension. Results showed no significant effects of word frequency, word class (i.e., adjectives vs. verbs), and type of association relationships (i.e., paradigmatic vs.…

Mixed methods research becomes more utilized in education research every year. As this pluralist paradigm begins to take hold, it becomes more and more necessary to take a critical eye to studies making use of different mixed methods approaches. An area of education research that has yet struggled to find a foothold with mixed methodology is…

Judgments about objects in the world are often based on probabilistic information (or cues). A frugal judgment strategy that utilizes memory (i.e., the ability to discriminate between known and unknown objects) as a cue for inference is the recognition heuristic (RH). The usefulness of the RH depends on the structure of the environment,…

This article analyses the reporting of evidence in Swiss direct-democratic campaigns in the health policy sector, assuming that an informed public helps democracy function successfully. A content analysis of the media's news reporting shows that of 5030 media items retrieved, a reference to evidence is found in 6.8%. The voter receives evidence in…

Proving that a given set is indeed a subgroup, one needs to show that it is non-empty, and closed under operation and inverses. This study focuses on the first condition, analysing students' responses to this task. Results suggest that there are three distinct problematic responses: the total absence of proving this condition, the problematic…

Skill in generating inferences predicts reading comprehension for students in the elementary and intermediate grades even after taking into account word reading, vocabulary knowledge, and cognitive ability (Cain et al., "Journal of Educational Psychology, 96," 671-81, 2004; Kendeou et al., "Journal of Research in Reading, 31,"…

Skill in generating inferences predicts reading comprehension for students in the elementary and intermediate grades even after taking into account word reading, vocabulary knowledge, and cognitive ability (Cain et al., "Journal of Educational Psychology, 96," 671-81, 2004; Kendeou et al., "Journal of Research in Reading," 31,…

Psi phenomena, such as mental telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance, have garnered much recent attention. We reassess the evidence for psi effects from Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Risio's (2010) meta-analysis. Our analysis differs from Storm et al.'s in that we rely on Bayes factors, a Bayesian approach for stating the evidence from data for…

Following Stokoe (2012), who grounded her study of membership categorization practices in the analysis of particular sequences of interaction, such as advice-giving, Elizabeth Reddington examines how participants invoke and orient to categories in story-telling episodes. Because category terms are inherently inference-rich (Schegloff, 2007),…

The main goal of this research is to design, implement, and evaluate a novel explanation method, the hierarchical explanation method (HEM), for explaining Bayesian network (BN) inference when the network is modeling a population of conditionally independent agents, each of which is modeled as a subnetwork. For example, consider disease-outbreak…

Kane's paper "Validating the Interpretations and Uses of Test Scores" is the most complete and clearest discussion yet available of the argument-based approach to validation. At its most basic level, validation as formulated by Kane is fundamentally a simply-stated two-step enterprise: (1) specify the claims inherent in a particular interpretation…

Research on classroom response systems (CRSs) in chemical education has primarily focused on the development of evidence-based strategies for implementation and novel practitioner uses of CRSs in instructional practice. Our national survey of postsecondary chemistry faculty extends these discussions, providing a broad-based understanding of the…