This paper considers the use of secondary data analysis in educational research. It addresses some of the promises and potential pitfalls that influence its use and explores a possible role for the secondary analysis of numeric data in the "new" political arithmetic tradition of social research. Secondary data analysis is a relatively under-used…

In discussing the place of diverse qualitative research within psychological science, the authors highlight the potential permeability of the quantitative-qualitative boundary and identify different ways of increasing communication between researchers specializing in different methods. Explicating diversity within qualitative research is…

When speakers detect a problem in what they are saying, they must decide whether or not to interrupt themselves and repair the problem, and if so, when. Speakers will maximize accuracy if they interrupt themselves as soon as they detect a problem, but they will maximize fluency if they go on speaking until they are ready to produce the repair.…

There is a degree of instability in any measurement, so that if it is repeated, it is possible that a different result may be obtained. Such instability, generally described as "measurement error", may affect the conclusions drawn from an investigation, and methods exist for allowing it. It is less widely known that different disciplines, and…

In this article, the author argues that Method sections in social science research reports, particularly those that employ qualitative methods, often lack sufficient detail to make any results that follow from the analytic method trustworthy. The author provides a brief review of the evolution of the Method section from the 1960s to the present,…

Objective: The links between child maltreatment and juvenile offending are well established. However, the majority of maltreated children do not offend. The research presented in this paper examines the impact that timing and chronicity of child maltreatment have on juvenile offending. Methods: Administrative data were obtained on all children who…

Laboratory exercises, which utilize alkaline phosphatase as a model enzyme, have been developed and used extensively in undergraduate biochemistry courses to illustrate enzyme steady-state kinetics. A bioinformatics laboratory exercise for the biochemistry laboratory, which complements the traditional alkaline phosphatase kinetics exercise, was…

In recent years, rapid advancement has taken place in computing technology that allows institutional researchers to efficiently and effectively address data of increasing volume and structural complexity (Luan, 2002). In this chapter, the authors propose a new data analytical technique, Bayesian belief networks (BBN), to add to the toolbox for…

This paper introduces a method for mining multiple-choice assessment data for similarity of the concepts represented by the multiple choice responses. The resulting similarity matrix can be used to visualize the distance between concepts in a lower-dimensional space. This gives an instructor a visualization of the relative difficulty of concepts…

The nature and scope of available documents are changing significantly in many areas of document analysis and retrieval as complex, heterogeneous collections become accessible to virtually everyone via the web. The increasing level of diversity presents a great challenge for document image content categorization, indexing, and retrieval.…

Purpose. The first purpose of this study was to determine to what extent task and relationship conflict occurred in school district cabinets during budget development in a state budget crisis. The second purpose was to determine which cabinet member task and relationship conflict behaviors were demonstrated during budget development in a state…

Meaning making is central to transformative learning, but little work has explored how meaning is constructed in the process. Moreover, no meaning-making theory adequately captures its characteristics and operations during radical transformation. The purpose of this dissertation was to formulate and specify a multiperspectival conceptual model of…

This mixed method case study explored how an institution might further incorporate the constructivist learning theory into their curriculum by integrating an experiential teaching strategy referred to as an ePortfolio system. Using a sequential explanatory design, the study used surveys and interviews to investigate how faculty and staff perceived…

This study provides an overview of the issues science teachers faced in the 2006-07 school year with the change to the block schedule in Wake County, North Carolina. The purpose of this research was to address gaps in literature related to changes teachers had made in their instruction and interaction with students after the implementation of the…

NCHEMS (National Center for Higher Education Management Systems) has worked with the National Association of Systems heads (NASH)--with support from the Lumina Foundation for Education--to develop (1) empirically-based access regions for postsecondary institutions based on student enrollment patterns and (2) access, transition, and completion…