The Missouri Academy of Science, Mathematics and Computing (Missouri Academy) is a two-year accelerated, early-entrance-to-college, residential school that matches the level, complexity and pace of the curriculum with the readiness and motivation of high achieving high school students. The school is a part of Northwest Missouri State University…

Subtitling or captioning the dialogues of English movies can be very helpful to EFL learners in the Arab world. The present study reviews the importance of subtitling for language learning in general and listening comprehension in particular. A comparison is made between different levels of listening comprehension and different genres of English…

This paper focuses on family involvement in the education of teenagers at risk of dropping out from compulsory secondary school. A questionnaire was completed by 131 Spanish and Cypriot families with children at six schools--three in each country. The questionnaire investigated: (1) parental perceptions of their children's activities in their free…

The "No Child Left Behind Act" (NCLB, 2001) required schools to make adequate yearly progress, use disaggregated data in planning, and employ highly-qualified teachers. The school leaders became those responsible for the success of the school. In South Carolina the Department of Education has recently sought to address adequacy needs…

This report summarizes the findings of an analysis of a series of action research projects conducted by Goshen Community Schools at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. During the 2008-2009 school year, 40 teachers participated in independent action research studies regarding the extent to which a six step approach to direct vocabulary…

Despite the prevalence of multiple choice items in educational testing, there is a dearth of empirical evidence for multiple choice item writing rules. The purpose of this study was to expand the base of empirical evidence by examining the use of the "all-of-the-above" option in a multiple choice examination in order to assess how…

Purpose: This analysis describes the association of health and functional status with private and public religious practice among ethnically diverse (African American, Native American, white) rural older adults with diabetes. Methods: Data were collected using a population-based, cross-sectional, stratified, random sample survey of 701…

Evidence-based practice is highly valued in health care literature at this time. But research suggests that U.S. RNs face many obstacles when implementing evidence-based practice including a lack of value for research in practice (Pravikoff et al, 2005). Additional obstacles may exist for traditional U.S. BSN nursing students who may not value the…

Despite the increasing criticism of statistical significance testing by researchers, particularly in the publication of the 1994 American Psychological Association's style manual, statistical significance test results are still popular in journal articles. For this reason, it remains important to understand the logic of inferential statistics. A…

This report examines both the substantiveness and statistical significance of differences between mean American College Testing (ACT) Program assessment scale scores. The first part of the report describes the development and results of a method for interpreting the substantiveness of mean differences in terms of test items correctly answered. For…

Three criticisms of overreliance on results from statistical significance tests are noted. It is suggested that: (1) statistical significance tests are often tautological; (2) some uses can involve comparisons that are not completely sensible; and (3) using statistical significance tests to evaluate both methodological assumptions (e.g., the…

This paper examines the problems caused by relying solely on statistical significance tests to interpret results in contemporary social science. The place of significance testing in educational research has often been debated. Among the problems in reporting statistical significance are questions of definition and terminology. Problems are also…

Discusses the necessity for considering significance level reversal when attempting to establish group equivalence prior to treatment. (GS)

Advantages of the use of multivariate commonality analysis are discussed and a small data set is used to illustrate the analysis and as a model to enable readers to conduct such an analysis. A noteworthy advantage of commonality analysis is that commonality honors the relationships among variables by determining the degree to which predictors in a…

This paper focuses on two methods of performing multiple comparisons (post hoc or unplanned versus a priori or planned) for determining exactly where statistically significant results arise when there are more than "k equals two" groups. Textbook views and recommendations regarding the use of these two types of multiple comparisons are…