This article introduces the Main Idea Strategy, a strategy to improve the performance of students with disabilities and students who perform poorly on reading comprehension tasks. The rationale, research background, and detailed implementation information are presented.

Larry Palinkas advances the developing science of social work by providing an explanation of how social science research methods, both qualitative and quantitative, can improve our capacity to draw casual inferences. Understanding causal relations and making causal inferences--with the promise of being able to predict and control outcomes--is…

This response considers together simultaneously occurring discussions about causal inference in social work and allied health and social science disciplines. It places emphasis on scholarship that integrates the potential outcomes model with directed acyclic graphing techniques to extract core steps in causal inference. Although this scholarship…

Written in response to criticism of our work by Fouad Abd-El-Khalick, this position paper reaffirms and reinforces our position about the need to broaden and enrich the scope of nature of science (NOS) oriented curricula by exposing students to the voices of practising scientists. While Abd-El-Khalick's motivation for promoting the so-called…

This qualitative study explored the reactions of practicing teachers when presented with an "encounter" experience that challenged them to examine their own bias in an on-line graduate course. In this case, the encounter experience was completing two Implicit Association Tests--one on race and one on skin tone. The researchers examined…

In the late 1970's, Durkin's landmark study showed that less than 1% of elementary classroom reading instruction was dedicated to comprehension strategies because teachers were not explicit in their instruction. This qualitative study explored the types of questions posed by elementary and middle school teachers to elicit students' responses and…

Private tuition refers to tutoring offered outside mainstream teaching. The study sought to establish the difference in prevalence for private tuition among parents, teachers and pupils in public primary schools in Machakos County. The study employed descriptive survey design. The target populations were all teachers, parents and pupils of public…

Studies investigating individual differences in reading ability often involve data sets containing a large number of collinear predictors and a small number of observations. In this article, we discuss the method of Random Forests and demonstrate its suitability for addressing the statistical concerns raised by such data sets. The method is…

High-performing teachers tend to seek out positions at more affluent or academically challenging schools, which tend to hire more experienced, effective educators. Consequently, low-income and minority students are more likely to attend schools with less experienced and less effective educators (see, for example, DeMonte & Hanna, 2014; Office…

The effect of simulation-based probability teaching on the prospective teachers' inference skills has been examined with this research. In line with this purpose, it has been aimed to examine the design, implementation and efficiency of a learning environment for experimental probability. Activities were built on modeling, simulation and the…

Studies have proven that merging hands-on and online learning can result in an enhanced experience in learning science. In contrast to traditional online learning, multiple in-classroom activities may be involved in an augmented-reality (AR)-embedded e-learning process and thus could reduce the effects of individual differences. Using a…

Younger and older adults differ in performance on a range of social-cognitive skills, with older adults having difficulties in decoding nonverbal cues to emotion and intentions. Such skills are likely to be important when deciding whether someone is being sarcastic. In the current study we investigated in a life span sample whether there are…

This paper describes the process employed by a psychological service to gather the views of children and young people using guided discussion groups and questionnaires. Pupils in the guided discussion groups were asked to identify issues that affect them and how adults could help. This information was analysed using thematic analysis. Seven themes…

Students with significant cognitive disabilities present an assessment dilemma that centers on access and validity in large-scale testing programs. Typically, access is improved by eliminating construct-irrelevant barriers, while validity is improved, in part, through test standardization. In this article, one state's alternate assessment data…

This study aims to understand how EFL learners in different reading proficiency levels comprehend L2 texts, using five-component skills involving measures of (1) vocabulary knowledge, (2) drawing inferences and predictions, (3) knowledge of text structure and discourse organization, (4) identifying the main idea and summarizing skills, and (5)…