The California School Climate and Safety Survey-Short Form (CSCSS-SF) was developed as a streamlined version (54 items) of the original CSCSS (102 items) for school safety teams to gather information regarding student perceptions of campus climate, safety, and experience of victimization. Using a longitudinal dataset, this study implemented…

Recent handbooks of giftedness or expertise propose a plethora of conceptions on the development of excellent performance but, to our knowledge, there are no comparative studies that provide empirical evidence of their validity to guide researchers and practitioners in their adoption of a particular conception. This study sought to close that gap…

The teachers' perception and implementation of differentiated instruction, the difference between novice and experience teachers' perception on differentiate instruction, and the predictive relationship between teachers' perceptions and teachers' implementation of differentiated instruction were studied. The study utilized a…

The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of alternative approaches to administering and scoring curriculum-based measurement for written expression. Specifically, three response durations (3, 5, and 7 minutes) and six score types (total words written, words spelled correctly, percent of words spelled correctly,…

Observational methods are increasingly being used in classrooms to evaluate the quality of teaching. Operational procedures for observing teachers are somewhat arbitrary in existing measures and vary across different instruments. To study the effect of different observation procedures on score reliability and validity, we conducted an experimental…

The purpose of this study was to develop and test the construct validity and reliability of a self-report measure of self-regulated practice behaviors for beginning and intermediate instrumentalists. A questionnaire was designed to assess the motive, method, behavior, time management, and social influences dimensions of the theoretical model of…

Objectives: This article describes two studies related to the development of the Perceived School Experiences Scale (PSES). The PSES may be used by social workers to assess youths' perceptions of three school-related protective factors, including school connectedness, academic press, and academic motivation. Method: In Study 1, exploratory and…

Vocal demands of teaching are considerable and these challenges are greater for choral directors who depend on the voice as a musical and instructive instrument. The purpose of this study was to (1) examine choral directors' vocal condition using a modified Voice Handicap Index (VHI), and (2) determine the extent to which the major variables…

We present a method for assessing science inquiry performance, specifically for the inquiry skill of designing and conducting experiments, using educational data mining on students' log data from online microworlds in the Inq-ITS system (Inquiry Intelligent Tutoring System; www.inq-its.org). In our approach, we use a 2-step process: First we use…

In this follow-up to "Do High Flyers Maintain Their Altitude? Performance Trends of Top Students," the academic growth of 35,000 elementary and middle school students in 31 states, all of them high achievers within their own schools, were followed over a three-year period. Their achievement scores were matched with their associated…

Background: Cigarette smoking is a health-risk behavior of global proportions. Self-efficacy plays an important role in both smoking acquisition and smoking resistance. Reliability and validity of an instrument is fundamental to research results, particularly in its simplified form on a different population. The purpose of this study was to…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the number of transitions by students from school to school on their mathematics achievement. Transition is defined as the number of times a student has changed schools from Kindergarten to the current school year. This study also looked at the relationship between the students' perceived…

The purpose of this study was to examine the reliability and validity of outcome likelihood, outcome value, and outcome expectancy using data collected from students in secondary school physical education classes. Dependent measures were examined for construct, concurrent, and predictive validity, as well as internal and temporal reliability. The…

The aim of this study was to examine students' performance calibration in physical education. One hundred fifth and sixth grade students provided estimations regarding their performance in a dribbling test after practicing dribbling for 16 minutes under different self-regulatory conditions (i.e., receiving feedback, setting goals, self-recording).…

Middle school mathematics teacher quality is questionable because the number of certified mathematics teachers considered highly qualified is low (Birman et al., 2009). The author examined Grade 8 data from the 2005 National Association of Educational Progress mathematics assessment. The purposes of the study were to (a) determine the impact of…