This empirical study employed the inductive qualitative research method with four faculty who retired from a private, religiously-affiliated, Midwestern university. Participants possessed diverging experiences and representative prototypes. The literature suggests that higher education likely will experience significant numbers of retired faculty…

A causal-comparative pre-test, post-test design was used to investigate differences in learning in a research methods course for face-to-face and web-based delivery models. Analyses of participant achievement (N = 205) revealed almost no differences but post-hoc analyses revealed important differences in pedagogy between delivery models despite…

This review presents an overview of selected articles on the leniency hypothesis: the idea that students give higher evaluations to instructors who grade more leniently. Such articles comprise a small subset of the voluminous research on student evaluations of teaching (SETs). In this diverse literature, research methods and aims have frequently…

Using rigorous qualitative research methodology, twenty-four college students receiving their undergraduate degrees in three years were interviewed. Following analysis of the semi-structured interview transcripts and coding, themes emerged, indicating that these students possessed self-discipline, self-motivation, and drive. Overall, the results…

Education accompanied by social mobility is the cornerstone of the American dream. Yet, each year scores of children, especially those from the underprivileged class, fail to meet even the most modest academic expectations and subsequently never reach their academic potential. This research rejects earlier explanations of academic failure and…

Effective exploration of spatially referenced educational achievement data can help educational researchers and policy analysts accelerate interpretation of datasets to gain valuable insights. This paper illustrates the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to analyze educational achievement gaps in Arkansas. It introduces the Geographic…

In 2002-03, a qualitative study examined the experiences of 70 stakeholders connected to two community-based adult literacy programs in Manitoba, Canada. Self-directed learning was one of several elements that these research participants considered essential to the learning process. These literacy stakeholders defined self-directed learning as a…

Examined two methods of studying teachers' mathematics-content/pedagogy beliefs and their instructional decision making in 10 videotaped class sessions for each of teachers. Results with a video reflection and a theory reflection method indicate that both methods are useful in obtaining teacher belief data. (SLD)

In addition to giving an overview of Delphi methodology and describing the methodology used by the researchers in two Delphi studies, the authors provide information about electronic communication in Delphi studies. Also provided are suggestions that can be used in a Delphi study involving any form of communication. (SLD)

A content analysis of 10,279 dissertation abstracts in education from 1950 to 1990 shows that the descriptive design, predominantly in surveys, has dominated. Almost one-fourth of the dissertations used no statistics, and almost one-third failed to find statistically significant results. Few changes are apparent over the years. (SLD)

A model projecting school enrollment by using births lagged an appropriate number of years and a model using lagged births and the previous year's enrollment were applied to two school grade levels and state and county levels in Kentucky. The model using lagged births and earlier figures provided better predictions. (SLD)

In view of the fact that present studies of teacher effectiveness are incongruent and ineffective, a new approach--cognitive information processing--is evolving. The author contends that this new approach will lead to changes in topics of research, methods of research, and nature of the results. (JKS)

A technique for observing reading behavior called the disruptive effect is presented. The technique involves interspersing unusual words or pseudo-words into a text and observing errors made during oral reading. Results of research on the technique are presented. (JKS)

Futures research is defined as the development and use of forecasting techniques: (1) for estimating the likelihood of an event's occurence over time; (2) for examining the probability of one event's occurence affecting the likelihood of another event's occurence; and, (3) for analyzing the relationships among forecasted alternatives. (Author)

Guilford has argued that factor analysis is not adequate for demonstrating meaningful higher-order factors in his structure of Intellect (SOI) model. Study investigates the validity of this claim. (RB)