Descriptive statistics were utilized to examine the relation between early childhood education and care quality indicators found in state child care regulations and the number of National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) accredited programs in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The data analysis provided the first…

Data mining of IPEDS data is used to develop models that calculate predicted graduation rates for two- and four-year institutions. (Contains 7 tables and 5 figures.)

Continuing education divisions in community colleges tend to be among the most entrepreneurial and innovative programs in higher education. This chapter presents data from a national survey of continuing education programs and suggests that shifting economic and institutional factors influence the manner in which community colleges offer those…

Early assimilation theorists predicted the eventual loss of ethnic distinctiveness for immigrants in the United States. In this paper, the author not only questions the possibilities that Latino and Latina Americans have for losing their ethnic distinctiveness, but also proposes that these possibilities vary widely within the Hispanic population.…

Empowerment evaluation entered the evaluation lexicon in 1993. Since that time, it has attracted many adherents, as well as vocal detractors. A prominent issue in the debates on empowerment evaluation concerns the extent to which empowerment evaluation can be readily distinguished from other approaches to evaluation that share with it an emphasis…

This study assessed muscular torque and rate of torque development following concentric (CON) or eccentric (ECC) isokinetic training. Thirty-eight women were randomly assigned to either CON or ECC training groups. Training consisted of knee extension and flexion of the nondominant leg three times per week for 20 weeks (SD = 1). Eccentric training…

This analysis exploits the variation across states in the timing of policy implementation to determine if family cap policies lead to a reduction in births to women aged 15 to 34. Vital statistics birth data for the years 1989 to 1998 offer no such evidence. The data reject a decline in births of more than one percent. The finding is robust to…

In recent years, forensic science has gained popularity thanks in part to high-profile court cases and television programs. Although the cost of forensic equipment and supplies may initially seem too expensive for the typical high school classroom, the author developed an activity that incorporates forensics into her 10th-grade biology curriculum…

The current study evaluates existing and new validity evidence for the Academic Motivation Scale (AMS; Vallerand et al., 1992). We first provide a narrative review synthesizing past research, and then conduct a validity investigation of the scores from the measure. Data analysis using a sample of 1406 American college students provided construct…

Item content-relevance is an important consideration for researchers when developing scales used to measure psychological constructs. Aiken (1980) proposed a statistic, "V," that can be used to summarize item content-relevance ratings obtained from a panel of expert judges. This article proposes the application of the Score confidence interval to…

This note provides an analysis of the determinants of educational outcomes at age 16, and of subsequent pathways as school pupils transit toward the labour market. There is some evidence that examination results tend to be better where nondidactic teaching methods are used, but there is little evidence to suggest that teaching method has an…

The translation into French of the Encoded Archival Context (EAC) DTD tag library has been in progress for a few months. It is being carried out by a group of experts gathered by AFNOR, the French national standards agency. The main goal of this group is to foster the interoperability of authority data between archives, libraries and museums, and…

Instructors of sociology courses strive to teach their students how to "think sociologically" or how to apply a "sociological perspective" to the world. Many creative methods, often framed as "applied" or "active learning," have been created to pursue this goal, but these active learning projects are not perfect solutions. The natural sciences…

Speaking involves "linearizing" a message into a string of words. This process leaves us vulnerable to being interrupted in such a way that the aborted turn is a misrepresentation of the intended message. Further, because we linearize our messages in standard ways, we are recurrently vulnerable to interruptions at particular…

The performance of three equating methods--the presmoothed equipercentile method, the item response theory (IRT) true score method, and the IRT observed score method--were examined based on three equating criteria: the same distributions property, the first-order equity property, and the second-order equity property. The magnitude of the…