Instrumental variables (IV) methods allow for consistent estimation of causal effects, but suffer from poor finite-sample properties and data availability constraints. IV estimates also tend to have relatively large standard errors, often inhibiting the interpretability of differences between IV and non-IV point estimates. Lastly, instrumental…

The National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs, administered by the Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), are key components of the nation's food security safety net, providing free or low-cost meals to millions of schoolchildren each day. To qualify their children each year for free or…

Many telephone surveys require interviewers to observe and record respondents' gender based solely on respondents' voice. Researchers may rely on these observations to: (1) screen for study eligibility; (2) determine skip patterns; (3) foster interviewer tailoring strategies; (4) contribute to nonresponse assessment and adjustments; (5)…

Research on formative assessment has focused on the ways teachers implement and use formative assessment to check student understanding in order to guide their instruction. This study shifted emphasis away from teachers to look at how students use and perceive formative assessment in the science classroom. Four key strategies of formative…

Cross-national comparisons of responses to survey items are often affected by response style, particularly extreme response style (ERS). ERS varies across cultures, and has the potential to bias inferences in cross-national comparisons. For example, in both PISA and TIMSS assessments, it has been documented that when examined within countries,…

The practice of hiring adjunct instructors was initially considered to be an anomalous event (Todd, 2004). Community college employment of adjunct instructors, however, witnessed a 50% increase during the 1970s (Cain, 1999) and, by 1984, adjunct instructor utilization in community colleges rose dramatically with an additional 80% growth. Over a…

This research study was undertaken to gain a richer understanding of the use of patient-introduced online health information during the physician/patient examination and knowledge transfer process. Utilizing qualitative data obtained from ten family physician interviews and workflow modeling using activity diagrams and task structure charts, this…

As the violence in the Mexican drug war escalates, a proliferation of social media sites about drug trafficking in Mexico was followed by the murder of some of their users, and the eventual disappearance of many of those sites. Despite these events, there still exist a number of drug-dealing related social media outlets in this country with a…

States are making progress in supporting effective data use, but the hardest work remains. Although states collect quality data and have enacted policy changes, they have not yet focused on meeting people's needs. This report includes the following: (1) 10 State Actions; (2) Key Findings: Data for Action 2012; (3) States Are Making Progress, but…

Within the limited field of research on teachers' probabilistic knowledge, incorrect, inconsistent and even inexplicable responses to probabilistic tasks are most often accounted for by utilizing theories, frameworks and models, which are based upon heuristic and informal reasoning. More recently, the emergence of new research based upon informal…

This article investigates whether computer use for leisure could mediate or moderate the relations between age and cognitive functioning. Findings supported smaller age differences in measures of cognitive functioning for people who reported spending more hours using a computer. Because of the cross-sectional design of the study, two alternative…

In the school setting, teams are abundant, often serving multiple purposes, having various titles, and consisting of diverse members. Teams are considered an essential component of Response to Intervention (RtI) and are the vehicle through which data-based decision making occurs at the school, grade, small-group, and individual student level.…

The purpose of this paper is to study the effectiveness of oral presentation as an assessment tool in a Finance subject. Assessment data collected from a postgraduate Finance subject in an Australian university over a period of five years from 2005 to 2009 was analysed statistically to determine the relation between students' performance in oral…

In this article, the author describes a qualitative field study designed to test the effectiveness of Forum Theatre (FT) as a cross-disciplinary approach to Biblical parabolic literature analysis for students enrolled in a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) Academy. The author provides a brief overview of the theoretical framework of the study, the study…

Increasing interest in individualizing and adapting intervention services over time has led to the development of adaptive interventions. Adaptive interventions operationalize the individualization of a sequence of intervention options over time via the use of decision rules that input participant information and output intervention…