Purpose: As senior district leaders in US public schools make public statements about the importance of teachers of color for all students, their inaction in designing policies to recruit these educators can undermine diversity progress. This study explores the mixed messaging around one small urban district's effort to increase the ethnoracial…

This note demonstrates that the widely used Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) need not be generally viewed as a routinely dependable index for model selection when the bifactor and second-order factor models are examined as rival means for data description and explanation. To this end, we use an empirically relevant setting with…

This qualitative exploratory study investigated the selection and change of majors for nine HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) students. The study included individual structured interviews that provided data that answered the following research questions: 1) what factors influenced the initial selection of major, and 2) what…

Friendship is of great concern to young children (Unicef 2011. "The State of the World's Children." New York: United Nations Children's Fund). Research also suggests the positive outcomes friendships have on children's development, learning and well-being (Daniels, Tina, Danielle Quigley, Lisa Menard, and Linda Spence. 2010. "My…

Assessment instruments are critical to assist in the selection and development of strong, effective leaders. Developing a strong understanding of what makes a tool empirically sound, based on solid scientific concepts, can mean the difference between choosing an assessment that provides targeted, actionable, and accurate information versus an…

Across the world, teacher quality has come to be recognised as one of the most important variables affecting student outcomes; consequently, the regulation of entry into the profession is the subject of iterative review. The traditional 'one-off' interview, involving an interviewee and two or more interviewers, is a common, but not unproblematic,…

The purpose of this study was twofold. The first aim was to better understand the selection criteria that college students of varying demographic backgrounds find most important when making a final selection of a college or university during their college search process and the promotional information they find to be most useful, particularly…

Recommender systems in education aim to help students make good decisions about the direction of their learning. The design of such systems in conventional research has treated the decision making process of students as a black box and assumes the best recommendations to be those that accurately predict student choices. Such an approach overlooks…

Collaboration is an early emerging component of successful cooperative relations that produces a cascade of positive social preferences between collaborators. Concurrently, robust preferences for affiliated others may restrict these benefits to in-group peers. We investigated how in-group affiliation (based on minimal group markers) and…

Collection development is at the core of the work of children's librarians, an ongoing activity that shapes collections as well as library spaces, services, programming, and communities. The process of collection development includes the consideration of several factors that impact the evaluation, selection, and acquisition of books available for…

While a substantial body of work has shown that higher-SES students tend to apply to more selective colleges than their lower-SES counterparts, we know relatively less about "why" students differ in their application behavior. In this study, we draw upon a sociological approach to educational stratification to unpack the SES-based gap in…

Objective: To understand the rewards university students associate with two key decisions shaping food choices. Participants: Thirty-eight university students. Methods: In this exploratory research, we conducted focus groups to identify the rewards students associated with choosing to eat at the campus dining hall and their specific food choices…

Despite college rankings' popular yet controversial nature, there is little known about the relationship between college rankings and students. Prior literature suggests that students who make use of rankings are more privileged, yet there lacks a comprehensive analysis surrounding the types of students who place importance on rankings in more…

Nowadays, with increasing competitiveness in every field, securing a good job may be difficult. In this connection, students aiming to get into the best educational institution (EI) would give them their best chance of quality education and good job opportunities. Institutional evaluation and selection are complex tasks that must simultaneously…

This qualitative case study explored the perceptions of hiring administrators in a suburban Pennsylvania school district regarding the influence of the Danielson Framework for Teaching (DFT) on the district teacher hiring practices. At the time of this study, research had shown that, out of all other factors, teachers had the largest influence on…