Education is witnessing an increasing demand for technology use in the classroom. At the same time, new teachers are entering the profession in high numbers, some being labeled as "Digital Natives" while others are labeled "Digital Immigrants". This qualitative case study investigated the technology practices of Digital Native and Digital…

The results of this study determined that community college students who transfer to for-profit institutions are indeed different from students who follow traditional routes defined as public and non-profit institutions. This study compares the demographic characteristics, academic experiences, and socioeconomic factors of California community…

The author is pleased to see that the future directions of the Council for Children with Behavioral Disorders (CCBD) are being addressed. The celebration of the 50th birthday of the inception of CCBD has set the occasion to carefully examine the status quo of the organization and to set future directions, as appropriate. The authors of "New…

This study explores the educational opportunities available to secondary high school students in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), using both public TDSB and Ontario Ministry of Education data. Family income, parental education, and student participation in special education (excluding Gifted) are key units of analysis, as are the types of…

This paper discusses the use of interactive graphics to teach multivariate data analysis to Psychology students. Three techniques are explored through separate activities: parallel coordinates/boxplots; principal components/exploratory factor analysis; and cluster analysis. With interactive graphics, students may perform important parts of the…

Locally controlled public schools are one of the cornerstones of our nation's democracy, yet many schools are not preparing students for success. Far too many students are not graduating, and many of those who do graduate are woefully unprepared for college or a meaningful career. Successfully initiating and sustaining meaningful improvements in…

The increased use of polytomous item formats has led assessment developers to pay greater attention to the detection of differential item functioning (DIF) in these items. DIF occurs when an item performs differently for two contrasting groups of respondents (e.g., males versus females) after controlling for differences in the abilities of the…

The door to college is open for increasing numbers of students for whom adapting to college may be a great challenge (Kamphoff, Hutson, Amundsen, & Atwood, 2007). Hansen (1998) noted that the overall academic preparation level has declined for students entering college and that academic disengagement in college has increased among many…

The inclusion of students with disabilities in large scale assessment and accountability programs has provided new opportunities to examine the impact of special education services on student achievement. Hanushek, Kain, and Rivkin (1998, 2002) evaluated the effectiveness of special education programs by examining students' gains on a large-scale…

The "Census in Schools Educator Update" is sent to educators and educational organizations periodically to keep them informed about current and upcoming census data and to provide ideas about how to use data in the classroom. This issue of the "Census in Schools Educator Update" newsletter focuses on the following topics: (1) Census in Schools…

"The Learning Principal" is an eight-page newsletter published eight times a year. It focuses on the important and unique work of school principals. This issue includes: (1) Data Analysis Is a Courageous Look in the Mirror (Valerie von Frank); (2) Q&A: Opening Doors, Opening Minds (Valerie von Frank); (3) Focus on NSDC's [National Staff…

The Standard for Vocational Education and Training (VET) financial data offers a nationally consistent standard for the collection, reporting and analysis of the public vocational education and training system information throughout Australia. It forms part of the Australian Vocational Education and Training Management Information Statistical…

Rhotics and laterals pattern together in a variety of ways that suggest that they form a phonological class (Walsh-Dickey 1997), yet capturing the relevant set of consonants and describing the behavior of its members has proven difficult under feature-based phonological theory (Wiese 2001). In this dissertation, I argue that an articulatory…

This study was designed to identify parental involvement activities used by successful schools. Participating schools were identified as successful by an Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS) rating of recognized or exemplary. Using survey methods, data was collected from the principals of the schools about parental involvement activities on…

We seek to simplify the creation of intelligent tutors by using student data acquired from standard computer aided instruction (CAI) in conjunction with educational data mining methods to automatically generate adaptive hints. In our previous work, we have automatically generated hints for logic tutoring by constructing a Markov Decision Process…