Researchers at the Gate: Factors Influencing Districts’ Right of Entry Decisions

Background: The No Child Left Behind legislation creates an increased need for new school-based empirical studies whose implementation will depend largely on researchers’ access to various school populations and records. Access decisions are typically made by superintendents, or their designees, functioning as gatekeepers who control right of entry. Understanding the factors driving these decisions could enhance the desirability of proposals and increase access rates for quantitative and qualitative researchers alike. Purpose: The purpose of this research was to query districts about four key access factors including (a) researcher trustworthiness, (b) associated risks, (c) costs and benefits, and (d) potential contribution to the field. Research Method: This study used a series of interviews followed by a systematic survey. Participants: Ten superintendents were interviewed followed by a survey of 310 districts in Connecticut, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. Findings: Although trustworthiness was expected to supercede other factors, districts reported greater interest in elements of risk and in research having widespread educational value. Costs and material benefits (e.g., equipment, credit, and compensation) were not highly emphasized nor relatively important. Professional development, planning, and instructional benefits mattered more. Implications for Research and Practice: Given the increasing emphasis on scientifically based research for school decision-making and program reform, the present study is notable for two reasons. First, it provides researchers with insights into the decision-making process involved in granting permission to conduct research in the schools. Second, it can help to improve the quality of proposals received by school districts, thereby increasing the likelihood of positive right-of-entry decisions and resulting in better informed decisions

Supporting Catholic Education through Effective School/University Partnerships: Two Models from the 2012 Catholic Higher Education Collaborative Conference

This essay was developed from a panel presentation by Henk and Maney, as well as other key professional colleagues, delivered at the 2012 CHEC Conference. The essay describes the formation and initial work of a consortium of five institutions of higher education in the greater Milwaukee area, including Alverno College, Cardinal Stritch University, Marian University, Marquette University, and Mount Mary College

Measuring the Reader Self-Perceptions of Adolescents: Introducing the RSPS2

This paper introduces a new affective instrument for assessing the reader self-perceptions of students in grades seven through ten. The Reader Self-Perception Scale 2 (RSPS2) builds upon its predecessor, the RSPS, a tool that measures the reading efficacy beliefs of children in grades four through six. New items were created for the RSPS2 to reflect differences in the expectations for adolescent reading. The instrument was piloted on 488 students, revised, and then validates with an additional 2,542 students in the target grades. Factor analytic procedures revealed four factors emerging on the RSPS2. Items for Progress, Observational Comparison, Social Feedback, and Physiological States clustered as expected into scales with reliabilities ranging from .87 to .95. The article includes a description of the instrument, an explanation of its possible uses in assessment, instruction, and research, as well as directions for administration, scoring, and interpretation

Are Drivers\u27 Manuals Understandable?

In 1984, researchers determined that the readability of state drivers\u27 manuals exceeded the average literacy levels in the United States. Because text complexity threatened the ability of license applicants and practicing drivers to understand the information presented in the manuals, a potential safety risk was indicated. This study analyzes recent editions of the manuals using readability formulas and formal text presentation ratings. It was found that the average difficulty of the drivers\u27 manuals was reduced by more than one grade level and that the 1994 manuals are clearly superior to their earlier versions, but that, in the interest of highway safety, improvements should still be sought

The Influence of Accelerated Reader on the Affective Literacy Orientations of Intermediate Grade Students

Although the highly popular Accelerated Reader (AR) book reading incentive program claims to motivate children of all reading ability levels, very little independent empirical research has examined this assertion. To help fill this void, we used two related three-factor mixed designs with Method (AR vs. Control), Gender, and either Grade Level(fourth vs. fifth) or Reading Ability (high vs. low) to explore AR’s influence on the reading attitudes and self-perceptions of children in two comparable school districts. The analyses indicate that AR positively influenced academic reading attitudes, but not recreational ones, and that it negatively influenced two types of self-perceptions in low achieving male readers. These findings and others of consequence are discussed along with implications for future research

Interacting Multiple Model-Feedback Particle Filter for Stochastic Hybrid Systems

In this paper, a novel feedback control-based particle filter algorithm for the continuous-time stochastic hybrid system estimation problem is presented. This particle filter is referred to as the interacting multiple model-feedback particle filter (IMM-FPF), and is based on the recently developed feedback particle filter. The IMM-FPF is comprised of a series of parallel FPFs, one for each discrete mode, and an exact filter recursion for the mode association probability. The proposed IMM-FPF represents a generalization of the Kalmanfilter based IMM algorithm to the general nonlinear filtering problem. The remarkable conclusion of this paper is that the IMM-FPF algorithm retains the innovation error-based feedback structure even for the nonlinear problem. The interaction/merging process is also handled via a control-based approach. The theoretical results are illustrated with the aid of a numerical example problem for a maneuvering target tracking application