Background: Associations of lower school connectedness have been seen with adolescent sexual risk behaviors, but little is known about gender differences with respect to these relationships. Understanding any such differences could contribute to better supporting the school environment to promote youth sexual health. Methods: We used provincially…

Background: Intrapersonal and external factors, including social pressures and the desire for acceptance from peers, influence sexual activity among adolescents. This study examined how personal characteristics, risky behaviors, normative beliefs, household factors, and engagement in extracurricular activities were related to high school freshman…

Recently there has been an increasing level of interest in subtest scores, or subscores, for their potential diagnostic value. Haberman (2008) suggested a method to determine if a subscore has added value over the total score. Researchers have often been interested in the performance of subgroups--for example, those based on gender or…

Differential item functioning (DIF) may be caused by an interaction of multiple manifest grouping variables or unexplored manifest variables, which cannot be detected by conventional DIF detection methods that are based on a single manifest grouping variable. Such DIF may be detected by a latent approach using the mixture item response theory…

Purpose: To determine the relative importance of acoustic parameters (fundamental frequency [F0], formant frequencies [FFs], aperiodicity, and spectrum level [SL]) on voice gender perception, the authors used a novel parameter-morphing approach that, unlike spectral envelope shifting, allows the application of nonuniform scale factors to transform…

"Die Zauberflöte" is simultaneously one of Mozart's most accessible and most complex operas. Yet while this duality makes it a potentially valuable cultural artifact for the language classroom, students' unfamiliarity with both its operatic genre and Enlightenment context can pose a challenge to teachers. This article functions…

In this paper, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the Morehouse College Appropriate Attire Policy and discuss how issues of race, gender, and sexuality converge to reveal both overt and hidden meanings embedded in the policy. I also consider how power is used towards "other" black college men who neither fit neatly into…

In this paper, we deploy M.M. Bakhtin's notions about how language works to understand aspiring teachers' struggles about the intersecting roles race, class, gender, language background, and sexual orientation play in students' school lives and learning. Through life-history interviews and document analysis, we investigated the…

The early childhood sector in England, known as the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), has been a site of intense policy intervention over the last decade, including the introduction of a statutory assessment of children's development at age five, conducted by teachers. National results from this assessment, the EYFS Profile, show continued…

In cross-cultural research, there is a tendency for researchers to draw inferences at the country level based on individual-level data. Such action implicitly and often mistakenly assumes that both the measuring instrument and its underlying construct(s) are operating equivalently across both levels. Based on responses from 5,482 college students…

This paper reports on a college community's views of the diagnostic characteristics and causes associated with autism spectrum disorders. An anonymous on-line survey of autism knowledge was distributed via campus server university-wide to all undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and staff. Of the 1,057 surveys completed, 76% of…

In this study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 52 college graduates as they entered a Postbaccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP). Our goal was to investigate what it means for these aspiring scientists, most of whom are from groups underrepresented in the sciences, to feel ready to apply to a doctoral program in the biomedical…

Sexual health programs on college campuses are often directed toward single individuals with a focus on sexual risk. Using a sample of college students, this study examines how relationship status relates to sexual behaviors and may be a factor for sexual risk. Based on the study's results, expansion of sexual health programming on college…

This study reports upon the perceptions of a sample of Education Studies undergraduates of their employability within three jobs: teaching, accountancy and marketing/sales management. The concept of employability is framed around two themes analysed through a Bernsteinian conceptual analysis: transferable utility of an Education Studies degree for…

Background: The paper plots some shifts in educational policy between 1988 and 2009 in England that launched the rhetoric of a "gender gap" as a key political and social concern. The rhetoric was fuelled by a rise in the importance of quantification in technologies of accountability and global comparisons of achievement. A focus on boys…