In a time of growth in secondary education online programs, there have been few studies directed at understanding secondary online programs and the students they serve. That is particularly true for large, inner-city public school districts with a diverse student body. This is a mixed methods case study which identified that students' primary…

This article reviews Giyoo Hatano's ground-breaking theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions to conceptual change research. In particular, his discovery of "vitalism" as part of children's legitimate and distinctive biology at early ages stands as a landmark. In addition, his work reinterpreted childhood "personification," changing…

The present study is aimed at identifying how prior causal beliefs and covariation information contribute to belief updating when evidence, either compatible or contradictory with those beliefs, is provided. Participants were presented with a cover story with which it was intended to activate or generate a causal belief. Variables related to the…

This paper examines the cost effectiveness of educating boarding and day secondary students in Kisumu district in Kenya. The research designs used in this study were descriptive survey and casual comparative designs. The population consisted of five head teachers, 140 form four teachers and 609 form four students. Saturated and systematic random…

An approach to handle partial compliance behavior using principal stratification is presented and applied to a subset of the longitudinal data from the New York City School Choice Scholarship Program, a randomized experiment designed to assess the effects of private schools versus public schools on academic achievement. The initial analysis…

Using student achievement data from British Columbia, Canada, this study is an exploration of the differences that lie within the private school sector using hierarchical linear modeling to analyze the data. The analysis showed that when controlling for language, parents' level of educational attainment, and prior achievement, the private school…

Matching methods such as nearest neighbor propensity score matching are increasingly popular techniques for controlling confounding in nonexperimental studies. However, simple k:1 matching methods, which select k well-matched comparison individuals for each treated individual, are sometimes criticized for being overly restrictive and discarding…

A. P. Blaisdell, K. Sawa, K. J. Leising, and M. R. Waldmann (2006) reported evidence for causal reasoning in rats. After learning through Pavlovian observation that Event A (a light) was a common cause of Events X (an auditory stimulus) and F (food), rats predicted F in the test phase when they observed Event X as a cue but not when they generated…

Two experiments examined developmental patterns in children's conditional reasoning with everyday causal conditionals. In Experiment 1, a group of pre-, early, young, and late adolescents generated counterexamples for a set of conditionals to validate developmental claims about the counterexample retrieval capacity. In Experiment 2, participants…

Background: Although extensive research has examined epistemological beliefs, reflective thinking and learning approaches, very few studies have looked at these three theoretical frameworks in their totality. Aims: This research tested two separate structural models of epistemological beliefs, learning approaches, reflective thinking and academic…

Dealing with alternative causes is necessary to avoid making inaccurate causal inferences from covariation data. However, information about alternative causes is frequently unavailable, rendering them unobserved. The current article reviews the way in which current learning models deal, or could deal, with unobserved causes. A new model of causal…

Researchers using structural equation modeling (SEM) aspire to learn about the world by seeking models with causal specifications that match the causal forces extant in the world. This quest for a model matching existing worldly causal forces constitutes an ontology that orients, or perhaps reorients, thinking about measurement validity. This…

In educational policy research, the orientation has shifted from a macro focus on central authorities to incorporating a micro focus on the multiple (often contradictory) policy practices within individual institutions. However, this new focus has not gone uncontested, and debate has revolved around the relevance of modernist conceptualizations of…

This study examined the association between organizational climate and changes in internalizing and externalizing behavior for youth in residential treatment centers (RTCs). The sample included 407 youth and 349 front-line residential treatment staff from 17 RTCs in Illinois. Youth behavior was measured using the Child Functional Assessment Rating…

Methods are needed for quantifying the potency and differential effects of risk factors to identify at-risk groups for theory building and intervention. Traditional methods for constructing war exposure measures are poorly suited to "unpack" differential relations between specific types of exposure and specific outcomes. This study of…