Preparing one's team for success on the basketball court involves a combination of strategies. One of the most effective but often overlooked strategies is a scouting report. A complete and thorough scouting report will have information about an opponent that helps prepare oneself and the team players for competition. Several areas need to be…

This article describes how job analysis, a method commonly used in personnel research and organizational psychology, provides a systematic method for documenting program staffing and service delivery that can improve evaluators' knowledge about program operations. Job analysis data can be used to increase evaluators' insight into how staffs…

The Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) is one of a few national surveys that regularly collects data identifying the American population of persons with hearing loss or deafness. Estimates from the SIPP indicate that fewer than 1 in 20 Americans are currently deaf or hard of hearing. In round numbers, nearly 10,000,000 persons are…

Efforts to gather data of various sorts--demographics, language-learning history, contact with native speakers, use of the language in the field--as they relate to participants in SLA research studies are inherent to understanding more about language acquisition and use. Scholars frequently develop questionnaires of their own, which are rarely…

Thirty-six participants performed bilateral and unilateral isometric elbow flexion trials at what they perceived to be 100, 75, 50, and 25% of maximal effort. Absolute bilateral deficits ranged from -16% at 25% effort to -10% at 100% effort. The deficit included a component independent of consciousness and a component inversely related to…

Many researchers have been inquiring into focus groups as a qualitative data collection method (Barbour & Kitzinger 1999; Krueger 1998; Morgan, 1998), but only a few have been able to analyze the different levels of understanding in focus groups, which we focus on in this article. The guiding research question is how do focus groups offer deeper…

In this article, part of the "Exemplar" series in "Advances in Health Sciences Education," we profile the career of Christine McGuire, and capture her perspectives on the status of medical education practice and research. Her career was prototypical of other exemplars in the series--a pathway characterized by serendipity. As an exemplar, her…

The Teacher Follow-up Survey (TFS) is sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education and is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. TFS is a follow-up survey of selected elementary and secondary school teachers who participated in the Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). SASS is the…

Federal education policy in recent years has encouraged state and local education agencies to embrace data use and analysis in decision-making, ranging from policy development and implementation to performance evaluation. The capacity of these agencies to make effective and methodologically sound use of collected data for these purposes remains an…

The National Dropout Prevention Center for Students with Disabilities (NDPC-SD) was assigned the task of compiling, analyzing, and summarizing the data for Indicator 1--Graduation--from the FFY 2009 Annual Performance Reports (APRs) and amended State Performance Plans (SPPs), which were submitted by states to the Office of Special Education…

The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09) is the fifth in a series of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) secondary longitudinal studies. The core research questions for HSLS:09 explore secondary to postsecondary transition plans and the evolution of those plans; the paths into and out of science, technology, engineering,…

This article highlights one strand of a study which investigated the concept of the violence-resilient school. In six inner-city secondary schools, data on violent incidents in school and violent crime in the neighbourhood were gathered, and compared with school practices to minimise violence, accessed through interviews. Some degree of…

Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate how participatory design methodologies can be used for the design of interactive learning tools for children. Design/methodology/approach: This paper presents the methodology employed for the design of a multimedia tool for teaching Greek to young children aged 6 to 12. The preliminary data collection…

Faculty learning communities provide an authentic forum through which to engage academics from diverse backgrounds in the scholarship of teaching, learning, and curriculum practice. The authors examine the development and impact of FLC strategies that were employed in an 8-month faculty certificate program on the scholarship of teaching and…

The culture at the authors' institution raised barriers to changing from traditional assessment to portfolio assessment in the doctoral program. A Culture of Independence presented barriers of time and functional inadequacy. A Culture of Compliance raised trust, group process, and membership issues. These barriers were managed and overcome using…