"In an age when browsing the net, playing with funky handsets and passing non-stop SMSs seem to be the order of the day, reading a book in a peaceful corner of a library has become an archaic idea for most people. While technology is slowly taking a steady control over individual lives, the reading habit is fast vanishing into thin…

This action-research paper focuses on the eorts of faculty to introduce a standards-based electronic portfolio (e-folio) requirement to aspiring educational administrators at a private university in New York over a 24 month period. The e-folio initiative was established for multiple reasons, including illustration of students' progress throughout…

When 2006 Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT) scores were released in March 2007, there were many questions about the comparability of the 2006 test to earlier ISATs. The 2006 ISAT was a new test, with new items, a new format, new timing requirements, and new scoring procedures. Many people were skeptical about whether it was appropriate to…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of Science-Technology-Society (STS) curriculum on students' scientific literacy, problem solving and decision making. Four hundred and eighty (480) Senior Secondary two science and non-science students were randomly selected from intact classes in six secondary schools in Calabar Municipality of…

Research in goal theory has often relied on the general linear model, ignoring some central assumptions of the theoretical framework under investigation. The purpose of the two studies reported here was to illustrate how the Rasch model can supplement traditional statistical analyses when evaluating the effects of goal orientations on persistence.…

Written and spoken language contains inherent mechanisms driving motivation. Accessing and modifying psycholinguistic mechanisms, links language frames to changes in behavior within the context of motivational profiling. For example, holding an object like an imported apple feels safe until one is informed it was grown in a toxic waste dump.…

This study compared the effectiveness of short-term developmental group counseling applying Gestalt-play versus cognitive-verbal approaches with Taiwanese adolescents. On a measure of behavioral and emotional strengths, teachers reported significant changes in students' overall behavioral and emotional strengths measured via total scores. Specific…

This paper comments on strengths and weaknesses of the papers on communities of practice in this special issue of "Technology, Pedagogy and Education." First it discusses the character of communities of practice and the question of whether schools are environments that are conducive to the development of teacher communities of practice. It then…

The "Social-Communication Assessment Tool" (S-CAT) was created as a direct observation instrument to quantify specific social and communication deficits of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) within educational settings. In this pilot study, the instrument's content validity and interrater reliability were investigated to determine the…

This monograph critiques the many nonexperimental impact estimation approaches that have been based on external comparison groups. It proposes an approach to evaluating employment and training (E&T) programs that calls for using the group of individuals who apply to a program but then choose not to participate in that program as an…

Considerations in conducting a study of salary equity for administrative faculty are addressed. The focus is whether there is a systematic difference in salary of administrative faculty based on race, sex, or age after all legitimate factors are removed. After defining the study population, attention is directed to the study model and research…

Production-function analysis, a correlation-based analysis, has been used for years to evaluate whether resources deposited into the educational process yielded a definitive result. For example, it has been used in several state cases as a measure of equity in educational funding. This paper is of the opinion that correlation-based analyses are…

This paper introduces criterion-referenced tests (CRTs), compares them with norm-referenced tests (NRTs), discusses how they can be evaluated and revised, and presents a study of an actual class and textbook test evaluation using CRTs. NRTs have dominated testing methodology since the mid-1970s; an example is the Test of English as a Foreign…

This paper presents a procedure by which institutional researchers can determine whether gender-salary discrimination exists at an institution of higher education. The procedure utilizes a statistical quality control tool, which is referred to as setting the process aim. This procedure is based on the premise that salaries are determined by a…

The research literature provides important guidance to counselors working to keep abreast of the latest thinking regarding best practices and recently developed counseling tools. The purpose of this digest is to highlight a few errors that seem to recur within the literature, and to provide some helpful references that further explore these…