School leaders are faced with the daunting task of anticipating the future and making conscious adaptations to their practices, in order to keep up and to be responsive to the environment. To succeed in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world, it is vital that schools grow, develop, adapt and take charge of change so that they can…

Working memory is where we "think" as we learn. A notion that emerges as a synthesis from several threads in the research literatures of cognition, motivation, and connectionism is that motivation in learning is the process whereby working memory resource allocation is instigated and sustained. This paper reviews much literature on motivation and…

Principals in the information age need to be information driven, committed to shared leadership and relentless about continuous improvement. They must reshape the processes, norms, and behaviors of teaching and learning around aggregating and interpreting shared information. In this article, the authors discuss the role of a principal in shaping…

In the Western academic tradition the literature review is seen as an essential first step toward legitimate research. Literature reviews, however, are also standard in many other scholarly publishing and proposal formats, whether as material included within the text or as provided in footnotes. The literature review serves to establish the…

In a review of the challenges to progress in providing social research evidence that might usefully inform policy, Oakley (2004) argues strongly that the "paradigm divide" between qualitative and quantitative research communities continues to constitute a major problem. Oakley refers to a number of recent critiques of what is seen as "misplaced…

A common problem in teaching undergraduate courses in the experimental analysis of behavior (EAB) is that the contemporary research literature is largely not comprehensible to most undergraduates. A suggested solution is the use of research articles from the early days of EAB. These are not only easy to understand but provide additional…

Five sister reports published by the Friedman Foundation over the past two years have ignored the relevant research literature in asserting that private-school voucher programs can reduce the social costs of dropping out while increasing graduation rates. The reports are state-specific, targeting five different states. But each report follows a…

Global economic transformations have never been as dramatic as in the twentieth century. Most countries have experienced radical changes in the standards of income per capita, technology, fertility, mortality, income inequality and the extent of democracy in the course of the past century. It is the goal of many disciplines--economics, history,…

Papers in this volume explore indicators of children's well-being in the following areas: cross-cutting issues; population, family, and neighborhood; and social development and problem behaviors. The first section includes: (1) "Potential and Problems in Developing Indicators on Child Well-Being from Administrative Data" (Robert M.…

In 1990, Milwaukee (Wisconsin) became the site of the first publicly funded school-choice program providing low-income parents with vouchers that could be used to send their children to secular, private schools. An evaluation of Milwaukee's school-choice experiment was conducted by a team of researchers, headed by John Witte at the University of…

Although reliability and validity are characteristics of test data, social scientists often attribute reliability and validity erroneously to the tests themselves. To determine the extent to which this problem exists, 150 reliability and validity studies selected from 3 prominent social science measurement journals over a 3-year period were…

Abuses and misuses of statistics are frequent. This digest attempts to warn against these in three broad classes of pitfalls: sources of bias, errors of methodology, and misinterpretation of results. Sources of bias are conditions or circumstances that affect the external validity of statistical results. In order for a researcher to make…

Although feminist perspectives about research have not been presented in a unified paradigm, feminist theory has helped to expose and demystify the empirical assumption of objectivity as the only way to truth in research. The feminist perspective in research represents alternate, non-oppressive formulations of what constitutes meaningful and valid…

A draft of a book, "School Choice: The Cultural Logic of Families, the Political Rationality of Institutions," received a great deal of media attention. The book contains research from nine different studies of school choice and includes an introduction and conclusion by Harvard professors Richard Elmore, Gary Orfield, and Bruce Fuller. The…

An evaluation of Round One of a pilot study of a system for identifying effective youth organizations around the world is presented in this report. The report begins with a page of general observations about the successes and shortcomings of the pilot study, indicating that in general the study accomplished its objectives but that a need for…