Taking a contextual approach to research on language learner beliefs, this longitudinal study of 49 Swiss university students learning Danish as a foreign language investigates how and why the participants change their beliefs over time. At the beginning of the three-semester language course, the participants believe that form-focussed approaches…

Argumentative thinking requires not only the "skill" to apply argumentative strategies such as supporting theories with evidence but also the "will" to apply these strategies by considering argumentative thinking to be both reasonable and worthwhile. Focusing on direct instruction for the initial acquisition of both skill and…

This research shows the development and influencing factors of high school English teachers' evaluation of professional learning community in Changchun, China. Followed Olivier and Hipp & Huffma's research, the teacher professional learning community evaluation questionnaire was developed by the researchers. 422 English teachers in Changchun…

This Statistics in Brief focuses on students whose parents have not attended college and examines these students' high school success and postsecondary enrollment, persistence and degree completion once they enrolled in college, and graduate school enrollment and employment outcomes after they attained a bachelor's degree. Their outcomes are…

Assessment plays crucial roles in educational process, and assessment results are seen as one of the best predictors of success or failure of the teaching-learning process. However, teachers' or teacher candidates' conceptions of conducting assessment have been mostly overlooked so far. To this end, the present study seeks to reveal the…

This study aims to examine preservice teachers' sentiments toward students with special needs, attitudes, and concerns about inclusive education in terms of a number of demographic variables. These demographics included major area, grade level, gender, interaction with disabled people, training for inclusive education, self-confidence for teaching…

This paper examined the outcome of growth and developmental challenges on the behavioral dispositions of in-school Christian adolescents in Nigeria. The study randomly sampled 222 respondents in Township of Kogi State, Nigeria. Six research questions and one null hypothesis was formulated to guide the study. Instrument used for data collection was…

A modified extensive reading literacy intervention was examined in this study. The problem was English Learner third and fourth-grade students reading standardized tests scores were low and educators were uncertain as to which type of intervention was best to improve English Learner student oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. This…

In response to a request for additional analyses, in particular reporting confidence intervals around the results, we re-analyzed the data from prior studies. This supplementary report presents the results of the additional analyses addressing classification accuracy, reliability, and criterion-related validity evidence. For ease of reference, we…

We evaluate the item response theory with covariates (IRT-C) procedure for assessing differential item functioning (DIF) without preknowledge of anchor items (Tay, Newman, & Vermunt, 2011). This procedure begins with a fully constrained baseline model, and candidate items are tested for uniform and/or nonuniform DIF using the Wald statistic.…

A latent variable modeling method for evaluation of interrater agreement is outlined. The procedure is useful for point and interval estimation of the degree of agreement among a given set of judges evaluating a group of targets. In addition, the approach allows one to test for identity in underlying thresholds across raters as well as to identify…

Odgaard and Fowler (2010) articulated the importance of reporting confidence intervals (CIs) on effect size estimates, and they provided useful formulas for doing so. However, one of their reported formulas, pertaining to the calculation of CIs on strength of association effect sizes (e.g., R[squared] or [eta][squared]), is erroneous. This comment…

Many articles within the literature point to the information security policy as one of the most important elements of an effective information security program. Even though this belief is continually referred to in many information security scholarly articles, very few research studies have been performed to corroborate this sentiment. Doherty and…

The paper presents the challenges of cross-country and cross-cultural research on the motivation to become a mathematics teacher based on data from the "Teacher Education and Development Study in Mathematics" ("TEDS-M"). Referring to studies from cross-cultural psychology, measurement invariance (MI) of constructs representing…

This study aims to reveal the levels of the use of computer, which is nowadays one of the most important technologies, of teacher candidate studying in the departments of Physical Education and Sport Teaching, and School teaching; also aims to research whether there is differences according to various criteria or not. In research, data were…