New technologies now offer teachers alternative models of collaboration with schools overseas, but how effective are they as professional development opportunities? The experiences of 18 specialist primary and secondary teachers in the Teachers' International Professional Development Programme who visited schools in the USA were investigated as…

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are becoming more common in UK psychology departments and the need to assess their reliability is apparent. Having examined the reliability of MCQs in our department we faced many questions from colleagues about why we were examining reliability, what it was that we were doing, and what should be reported when…

This article reports on a research project undertaken on behalf of the Standards Unit to research the impact of the Teaching and Learning National Transformation Programme for the Learning and Skills sector. The transformational programme is best described as having three enablers, namely teaching and learning resources to support practitioners,…

This study explores the development of a quantitative research designed to examine the accreditation system of undergraduate Business Administration program in private universities in Jordan, in comparison with the standards of the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) in the United Kingdom. The research has set out a description of Jordanian…

GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) Handling Data coursework should be a golden opportunity to engage students in meaningful "real-life" mathematics. The marking criteria for GCSE handling data coursework puts emphasis on students' ability to plan and carry out a statistical project and to make meaningful analysis of the…

Background: Investigations of the cognitive processes underlying specific language impairment (SLI) have implicated deficits in the storage and processing of phonological information, but to date these abilities have not been studied in the same group of children with SLI. Aims: To examine the extent to which deficits in immediate verbal…

Although our health professional students have some experience of simple charts, such as pie and bar, and some intuition of histograms, they do not appear to have much knowledge or understanding about box and whisker plots and their relation to the data they are describing or compared to histograms. The boxplot is a versatile charting tool, useful…

This paper describes the findings of an OECD project examining ICT impact measurement and analyses based on official statistics. Both economic and social impacts are covered and some results are presented. It attempts to place ICT impacts measurement into an Information Society conceptual framework, provides some suggestions for standardising…

Discusses statistical analyses of the effect of reduction in opening hours on book issues, or borrowing, of public library authorities (PLAs) in the United Kingdom. Demonstrates the difficulties involved in using statistical data to make accurate predictions of the impact of opening hour reductions on borrowing. (Author/LRW)

Twelve years ago Blatchford and Mortimore's authoritative review of class size research appeared in this journal. They concluded that a major problem with class size research was the lack of detailed studies of complex classroom processes that might mediate class size effects on pupils' learning. This article reviews two UK class size reviews and…

Examines methodological and data requirements for good-quality estimation of the education production function and reviews four UK studies that use pupil-level longitudinal data with a range of resource and control variables. These studies have produced some evidence of small resource effects on student outcomes and indicate the importance of…

Investigates the production-function relationship between educational resources and labor-market outcomes for higher education in the United Kingdom. Using ordinary least squares and hierarchical linear models, finds that graduate earnings are positively correlated to the level of resources per student and negatively correlated to the…

Purpose: The United Kingdom (UK) has recently published secondary education value added measures. This paper examines whether the approach used could also offer a possible method for measuring value added in higher education (HE). Design/methodology/approach: Previous attempts to measure HE value added in the UK, such as comparative value added…

The present study examined the predicted positive and linear relationship (Iwanaga, 1995a, 1995b) between exercise heart rate and music tempo preference. Initially, 128 undergraduate students (M age = 20.0 years, SD = 0.9) were surveyed to establish their three favorite music artists. A separate experimental group of 29 undergraduates (M age =…

Purpose: Despite the abundance of research on quality management there is no universal consensus on how best to measure quality in higher education. This paper undertakes a critical evaluation of the different methods used to assess the quality of provision in higher education departments in the UK. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on relevant…