Graduation rates are a fundamental indicator of whether or not the nation's public school system is doing what it is intended to do: enroll, engage, and educate youth to be productive members of society. Since almost 90 percent of the fastest-growing and highest-paying jobs require some postsecondary education, having a high school diploma and the…

The present study focused on two main goals. One was to test the "representational mapping hypothesis": The greater the transparency of the mapping between physical materials and desired internal representations, the greater the learning of the desired internal representation. The implication of the representational mapping hypothesis in the…

Data analysis is critical to educational planning. Determining the number of school leavers is crucial for a school board when planning for interventions and supports. In researching the number of early school leavers in the province of Prince Edward Island, the method in which the data were reported affected the rates. Two critical considerations…

Analyzing problem-behavior trajectories can be difficult. The data are generally categorical and often quite skewed, violating distributional assumptions of standard normal-theory statistical models. In this article, the authors present several currently available modeling options, all of which make appropriate distributional assumptions for the…

The hierarchical latent regression model (HLRM) is a flexible framework for estimating group-level proficiency while taking into account the complex sample designs often found in large-scale educational surveys. A complex assessment design in which information is collected at different levels (such as student, school, and district), the model also…

"The 2006 Winter Meeting of the AAPT Was Over..."and the flight home from Anchorage to Cleveland was just about to end--eight hours in the air, only two complimentary beverages, no meals, a jump across four time zones, a one-year-old baby daughter, and a wife whose motto for the week was, "Why did they choose to have a winter meeting in Alaska?"…

The interpretation of a Thurstonian model for paired comparisons where the utilities' covariance matrix is unrestricted proved to be difficult due to the comparative nature of the data. We show that under a suitable constraint the utilities' correlation matrix can be estimated, yielding a readily interpretable solution. This set of identification…

Since the publication of [Gelman, R., & Gallistel, C. R. (1978). "The child's understanding of number." Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.] seminal work on the development of verbal counting as a representation of number, the nature of the ontogenetic sources of the verbal counting principles has been intensely debated. The present…

K. Rayner, A. Pollatsek, D. Drieghe, T. J. Slattery, and E. D. Reichle argued that the R. Kliegl, A. Nuthmann, and R. Engbert corpus-analytic evidence for distributed processing during reading should not be accepted because (a) there might be problems of multicollinearity, (b) the distinction between content and function words and the skipping…

The four types of ionic equilibria--acid-base, redox, precipitation, and complexation--have certain similarities, which has led some authors to develop a unified treatment of them. These authors have highlighted the common aspects and tried to find a systemization of the equilibria that would facilitate learning them. In this unified treatment,…

Everyday, people face situations that call for adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing, and at least half of the time, these calculations are accomplished without the use of pen, paper, or calculators. Because figuring "in your head" is such an important life skill, it should have a regular role in classroom math teaching. This article…

The authors of this article introduce students in their department's construction course to a variety of energy-saving practices and processes. They describe activities that could give students an opportunity to apply design methodology in the creative pursuit of a solution to an open-ended problem. An introductory lecture gives students the…

The teaching of mathematics courses to chemistry students that is strongly based on symbolic computation and allows an instructor to explore a topic or principle is reviewed. The mathematical software available, nominally for symbolic computation associated with numerical and graphical capabilities are highly developed and provides an invaluable…

The authors develop and test generalized versions of take-the-best (TTB) and rational (RAT) models of multiattribute paired-comparison inference. The generalized models make allowances for subjective attribute weighting, probabilistic orders of attribute inspection, and noisy decision making. A key new test involves a response-time (RT)…

The Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) is conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on behalf of the United States Department of Education in order to collect extensive data on American public and private elementary and secondary schools. SASS provides data on the characteristics and qualifications of teachers and…