This article forecasts potential legal problems emerging from the use of new teacher evaluation systems in the states. This research was a policy analysis that combined three types of data to forecast the states and the legal challenges they might encounter: state policy data, selected case law, and problems from the literature of teacher…

Numerous organizations collect and distribute non-aggregate personal data for a variety of different purposes, including demographic and public health research. In these situations, the data distributor is responsible with the protection of the anonymity and personal information of individuals. Microaggregation is one of the most commonly used…

The aim of this paper is to discuss different approaches to the quality (or uncertainty) of measurement data considering both historical examples and today's students' views. Today's teaching of data analysis is very much focussed on the application of statistical routines (often called the "Gaussian approach" to error analysis). Studies on…

In this article, we propose using the Bayes factors (BF) to evaluate person fit in item response theory models under the framework of Bayesian evaluation of an informative diagnostic hypothesis. We first discuss the theoretical foundation for this application and how to analyze person fit using BF. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach,…

The authors introduce the Preparation in STEM Leadership Program at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. This NSF-Funded program and research study creates a centralized training program for peer leaders that includes a battery of assessments to evaluate peer leaders' content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, communication skills, and…

In recent years, performance management (PM) has become a buzzword in public sector organizations. Well-functioning PM systems rely on valid performance data, but critics point out that conflicting rationale or logic among professional staff in recording information can undermine the quality of the data. Based on a case study of social service…

Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter provide an unprecedented amount of qualitative data about organizations and collective behavior. Yet these new data sources lack critical information about the broader social context of collective behavior--or protect it behind strict privacy barriers. In this article, I introduce social media…

Strong relationships with senior administrators, effective cross-campus collaboration, and efficient use of technology are central to impactful IR in small colleges.

Null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) has been the subject of debate for decades and alternative approaches to data analysis have been proposed. This article addresses this debate from the perspective of scientific inquiry and inference. Inference is an inverse problem and application of statistical methods cannot reveal whether effects…

The advent of online platforms such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) has expanded considerably researchers' options for collecting research data. Many researchers, however, express understandable skepticism of the viability of using platforms such as MTurk. In this article, we provide a background on the use of MTurk as a mechanism for…

The outdoor leadership field is maturing in its understanding of activity safety and objective measures of risk exposure. Patterns of injury, relative exposure between related activities, and risk profiles per user group are only just beginning to accumulate academic findings from which a collective understanding of managing adventure-based risk…

Historically, community colleges have promoted social mobility by providing access to higher education, especially for underrepresented groups. Because of their geographic availability, open admissions policy, and low cost, these colleges have expanded educational opportunity to millions of Americans, young and old. Recently, however, the emphasis…

This article presents statistics about the cohort of foreign students studying at Russian universities. It will interest researchers and a large number of higher education professionals, including university administrators and employees at state oversight agencies. [This article was translated by Kenneth Cargill.]

Studies on reading literacy have yet to connect how students perceive the importance of different literacy areas to their ability perception in those areas. This article analyzes students' importance ranking of four different areas of literacy: prose (comprehending written information), document (interpreting information in forms, schedules,…

The premise for this study was that learner interaction in an online web-based course could be assessed in relation to academic performance, or in other words, e-learning. Although some studies reveal that learner interaction with online content is related to student academic performance, it remains unproven whether this is casual, or even if…