Many state and federal governments have mandated in such documents as the National Science Education Standards that inquiry strategies should be the focus of the teaching of science within school classrooms. The difficult part for success is changing teacher practices from perceived traditional ways of teaching to more inquiry-based approaches.…

There are advantages to using a priori or planned comparisons rather than omnibus multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) tests followed by post hoc or a posteriori testing. A small heuristic data set is used to illustrate these advantages. An omnibus MANOVA test was performed on the data followed by a post hoc test (discriminant analysis). A…

Statistical significance is often inappropriately equated with evaluating result importance and evaluating result replicability, even though these are three somewhat different issues. The prudent researcher must separately assess each of these elements of the "research triumvirate" by using different methods. This paper focuses on two…