Background: Publication is the primary means of contributing to and establishing credibility within the scientific community. Some researchers have reported an increase in the average number of authors per manuscript for some scholarly journals in the past two decades. Whereas author proliferation may be warranted in some cases, other reasons for…

This article presents the findings of a survey, conducted on league tables and rankings systems worldwide, including seventeen standard ones and one non-standard league table. Despite the capacity of existing league tables and rankings to meet the interest of the public of transparency and information on higher education institutions, ranking…

Time-series data from 1960-1998 is used to test hypotheses regarding the impact of protest and public opinion on the passage of U.S. environmental legislation. An amplification model of policy impact is introduced which posits that protest affects legislative action independent of public opinion as suggested by protest event theorists, whereas the…

During the 2006 Spring semester, student affairs administrators at West Virginia University called on all student affairs units to develop assessment plans that focused on student learning. Student affairs units were required to begin their assessment plans by selecting at least one learning outcome to measure. The Assessment Council, ten…

Qualitative research has increased in popularity among social scientists. While substantial attention has been given to various methods of qualitative analysis, there is a need to focus on strategies for collecting diverse forms of qualitative data. In this article, the authors discuss four sources of qualitative data: participant observation,…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…

This monograph details the process Building Engagement and Attainment for Minority Students (BEAMS) institutions used to craft data-driven action plans to improve student success. More than 100 four-year Historically Black, Hispanic-Serving, and Tribal colleges and universities participated in the five-year program that produced best practices…

This document conveys mandatory policies that have their basis in Federal Law and/or program regulations. It also provides interpretations of Federal Statutes and program regulations initiated by inquiries from State Child Welfare agencies or Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Regional Offices. The manual replaces the Children's…

Participatory exercises are standard practice in qualitative methods courses; less common are projects that engage students in the entire research process, from research design to write-up. Although the teaching literature provides several models of complete research projects, their feasibility, and appropriateness for large, compulsory,…

To what extent are the discourse behaviors of examiners salient to participants of an oral performance test? This exploratory study employs a grounded ethnographic approach to investigate the perceptions of the verbal, paralinguistic and nonverbal discourse behaviors of an examiner in a one-on-one role-play task that is one of four tasks in an…

Research studies on school success often focus on the impact of discrete elements such as race, culture, ethnicity, gender, language, or school location on high achievement. The condition of poverty, however, may be the most important of all student differences in relation to high achievement; although not all schools have racial diversity, nearly…

In this article, the authors present a data collection system to provide information about assault-related injuries within Newark, New Jersey. In 2001, Emergency Department (ED) staff at the six hospitals providing emergency medical care within the city collected data on all assault-related ED visits. Individual-level (n = 1,204) and…

Constructing model hot air balloons is an activity that captures the imaginations of students, enabling teachers to present required content to minds that are open to receive it. Additionally, there are few activities that lend themselves to integrating so much content across subject areas. In this article, the authors describe how they have…

This article provides a broad overview of the definition of web-based surveys examining some of the benefits and burdens related to using the Web for data collection. It draws upon the experience of two years of data collection on 10 university campuses demonstrating that there are noticeable differences in the speed with which web-based surveys…

When university academics implement changes in learning, such as introducing blended learning, it is conventional practice to examine and evaluate the impact of the resulting curriculum reform. Judging the worth and impact of an educational development is a complex task involving subtle differences in learning. Qualitative methods to explore these…