With research as a guide, designing CTE programs that promote equity and help close the opportunity gap is achievable. This is the fifth in a series of six practitioner training modules developed as part of the Career & Technical Education (CTE) Research Network Lead. Designed for CTE practitioners and state agency staff, these modules are…

As the education and workforce development community looks more and more to CTE to help ensure students are both college and career ready, understanding and using CTE data and research becomes increasingly important. This is the first in a series of six practitioner training modules developed as part of the Career & Technical Education (CTE)…

Continuous improvement, a structured process for using data and research to improve educational programming, is an important component in creating and maintaining successful CTE programs. For practitioners to engage in continuous improvement--and to use data and research to go beyond accountability--they need to maintain an effective data…

This resource has been written specifically for higher education practitioners who are interested in improving students' learning experiences through the process of researching their own practice. We use the term 'higher education practitioners' to describe all who work in universities and who have a stake in students' learning experiences.…

Whether the goal is to identify and describe trends and variation in populations, create new measures of key phenomena, or describe samples in studies aimed at identifying causal effects, description plays a critical role in the scientific process in general and education research in particular. Descriptive analysis identifies patterns in data to…

Educational technology products offer potentially effective means of supporting teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms. But for any given instructional need, there are likely to be numerous product options available for purchasing. What can school districts do to help ensure that good selections are made? In a recent, comprehensive study of…

This guide is addressed to policy officials, program providers, and researchers who are seeking to: (1) identify and implement social programs backed by valid evidence of effectiveness; or (2) sponsor or conduct an evaluation to determine whether a program is effective. The guide provides a brief overview of which studies can produce valid…

For over two decades, Dillman's classic text on survey design has aided both students and professionals in effectively planning and conducting mail, telephone, and, more recently, Internet surveys. The new edition is thoroughly updated and revised, and covers all aspects of survey research. It features expanded coverage of mobile phones, tablets,…

In the past decade or so, there has been an increasing interest in employing a combination of archival and life history methods to understand the complexities of schooling. This book explores the history of the Beal Technical School in order to discuss the methods and problems involved in researching the story of an institution. It offers the…

This book makes explicit connections between young children's spontaneous repeated actions and their representations of their emotional worlds. Drawing on the literature on schemas, attachment theory and family contexts, the author takes schema theory into the territory of the emotions, making it relevant to the social and emotional development…

As a comprehensive and practical guide for students, this book presents clear and straightforward information and advice. The authors present a perspective on methodology as a process, which begins from the moment that curiosity about a topic is aroused. Although in dissertations and theses methodology is normally reported within a single…

This book offers insights into the case study as a tool for educational research and suggests how it can be a prime research strategy for developing educational theory. The discussion takes readers through the stages of conducting case study research. The chapters of Part 1, "Reconstruction of Educational Case Study," are: (1) "Why Educational…

The article provides guidelines for readers who must read research articles but lack formal training in research and statistics. While discussing the purpose and content of each section of a research article (such as review of the literature, materials and procedures, and results) the author uses actual articles to illustrate her points.…

A tested approach to college enrollment management is presented that offers a system to assess and develop options for researching, maintaining, or improving enrollment goals. The new approach, the Enrollment Management Matrix, consists of three dimensions: (1) key variables in enrollment management (institutional product, data and information,…

The concept of statistical significance is explained, with specific numerical illustrations. (MNS)