Institutional researchers (IRs) are often asked to conduct focus groups as an efficient way to address an institutional concern or problem. Typically, IR professionals depend on external consultants and specialists to conduct these group interviews for them; however, due to recent resource constraints (staffing, budgets), they are increasingly…

Objectives: This paper explores the extent to which curriculum infusion (CI) impacted undergraduate students' alcohol use, perceived peer alcohol use, use of protective behavioural strategies, academic performance and course engagement. Design: Two faculty members infused content on norms and protective behavioural strategies into selected…

The authors examined abstracts written by graduate students for their research proposals as a requirement for a course in research methods in a distance learning MLIS program. The students learned under three instructional conditions that involved varying levels of access to worked examples created from abstracts representing research in the LIS…

The purpose of this enquiry was to examine how research design impacts on the predictive power of measures of self-efficacy. Three cautions for designing research into self-efficacy drawn from the seminal work of Albert Bandura (1986) and a further caution proposed by the current author together form the analytical framework for this enquiry. For…

The primary goal of this study is to create and test a lecture-capture system that can rearrange visual elements while recording is still taking place, in such a way that student performance can be positively influenced. The system we have devised is capable of integrating and rearranging multimedia sources, including learning content, the…

In this article, we test an alternative approach to creating a counterfactual basis for estimating individual and average treatment effects. Instead of using control/comparison groups or before-measures, the so-called Counterfactual as Self-Estimated by Program Participants (CSEPP) relies on program participants' self-estimations of their own…

As classrooms become increasingly diverse in higher education, educators are emphasising inclusive practices in teaching and learning to accommodate the needs of diverse learners. There is also an emerging need for an inclusive approach in assessment for accessibility, opportunity, relevance and engagement. This study, using design-based research…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of laboratory approach based on jigsaw method with cooperative learning and confirmatory laboratory approach on university students' cognitive process development in Science teaching laboratory applications, and to determine the opinions of the students on applied laboratory methods. The…

The aim of the present study is to reveal the impact of the interactive environment and metacognitive support (MS) in online learning on academic achievement and transactional distance (TD). The study is designed as 2 × 2 factorial design, and both qualitative and quantitative research techniques are used. The study was carried out on 127…

Salivary cortisol is often used as an index of physiological and psychological stress in exercise science and psychoneuroendocrine research. A primary concern when designing research studies examining cortisol stems from the high cost of analysis. Planned missing data designs involve intentionally omitting a random subset of observations from data…

The regression discontinuity (RD) design (Thistlewaite & Campbell, 1960; Cook, 2008) provides a framework to identify and estimate causal effects from a non-randomized design. Each subject of a RD design is assigned to the treatment (versus assignment to a non-treatment) whenever her/his observed value of the assignment variable equals or…

We review the effectiveness of first-year seminars based on the widely used criteria of first-year grades and the 1-year retention rate. Meta-analytic results indicate that first-year seminars have a small average effect on both first-year grades (k = 89, N = 52,406, d = 0.02) and the 1-year retention rate (k = 195, N = 169,666, d = 0.11). We…

Recent federal and state education policy has targeted community colleges as an affordable venue to increase postsecondary attainment. We examined a state program aimed at increasing community college enrollment, the Missouri A+ Schools Program, which provided eligible graduates from participating high schools the opportunity to earn a scholarship…

In Spain, the organisation of doctoral studies has been substantially modified to come into line with the changes introduced by the agenda of the Bologna process. These changes have been specified in a number of statements by European Ministers of Education, and have required alterations to Spanish doctoral regulations. The aim of these changes…

Many interesting research and design questions occur at the intersections of traditional disciplines, yet most coursework and research programs for undergraduate engineering students are focused on one discipline. This leads to underutilization of the potential in better preparing students through multidisciplinary projects. Identifying this…