Revised Historical Viewpoints

Project-based learning is an example of powerful social studies learning in which student engage in active inquiry. Action civics is a relatively new educational practice in which students act as citizens through a cycle of research, action, and reflection about problems they care about in their community. Building Civic Bridges offers teachers a model for students to develop and enact inquiry-based projects that reflect positive, and active, civic dispositions.     

Opportunities Missed

This paper places Stephen Mitchell's two early papers on homosexuality in historical context and explores why they were relatively unknown in their time, despite this author's belief that they contain the essential ideas for changing the way psychoanalysts understand homosexuality and work clinically with gay patients. The papers contain the needed truths; but, because of entrenched antihomosexual bias in the psychoanalytic world, activism was necessary before the truth could be heard.     

Education for Democracy

Literacy skills taught in the elementary grades establish a good foundation but are not adequate for the demands of secondary content curriculum. In history, preservice teachers must be prepared with a solid content base along with the pedagogy for teaching that content. To better teach and enhance student writing, preservice teachers need to learn how to integrate discipline-specific literacy into their instruction, using instructional strategies that are explicitly taught with scaffold supports. The purpose of this article is to present instructional ideas and strategies designed to help students develop key cognitive skills in history and engage in deeper-level thinking as they learn to write like a historian. Each strategy is research-based and includes sample writing assignments.     

A model for comparisons with ordered categorical data

A model developed by Andrich for ordered categorical data is extended to develop tests for treatment effects with paired or matched samples. In particular, this includes analysis for pre-post studies and crossover designs. Some advantages of this model are that it allows for misclassification of subjects, yields reasonable conditional requirements for exact analysis, a normal approximation is good for all but the smallest of sample sizes, and it is relatively simple mathematically. Furthermore, the form of the tests derived are logical extensions of tests for unordered categories.     

Sampling Richness and Qualitative Integrity: Challenges for Research With Families

Sampling is one of the most difficult and contentious aspects of qualitative research design. There are few guidelines for sampling decisions or for understanding saturation in qualitative family research. The authors frame the problematic of data quality in the selection of units of analysis and observation and consider how to enhance sample richness. They outline considerations for data quantity and sample size as well as case‐ and variable‐based approaches. With multiple examples from recent and classic studies to illustrate the consequences of sampling decisions, they explore links between saturation and validity. Finally, they encourage researchers to craft a coherent statement on qualitative integrity to demonstrate how their sampling decisions are rooted in epistemology, theory, and richness and quality of data.     

In Memoriam: Frank Wilcoxon

A mosaic is a graphical display of cross-classified data in which each count is represented by a rectangle of area proportional to the count. The positions and sides of the rectangles are set to encourage comparisons between counts in the figures. Mosaics are useful for discovering unusually high or small counts and for discovering dependencies between variables. In principle, mosaics may be used for any number of cross-classifying variables, but six seems to be a practical maximum. A mosaic is given for a four-way classification of Nielsen ratings.     

Upper Confidence Limits on Excess Risk for Quantitative Responses

The definition and observation of clear-cut adverse health effects for continuous (quantitative) responses, such as altered body weights or organ weights, are difficult propositions. Thus, methods of risk assessment commonly used for binary (quantal) toxic responses such as cancer are not directly applicable. In this paper, two methods for calculating upper confidence limits on excess risk for quantitative toxic effects are proposed, based on a particular definition of an adverse quantitative response. The methods are illustrated with data from a dose-response study, and their performance is evaluated with a Monte Carlo simulation study.     

A model for the assessment of static and dynamic factors in sexual offenders

A sample of 519 sexual offenders who were consecutive admissions to the Ontario Region of Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) were assessed with reference to a large series of variables thought to be related to sexual offending. We grouped these variables into five domains: criminality, social competence, sexual deviance, substance abuse and treatment readiness. We standardized scores on each of these domains to facilitate the calculation of total scores for each domain. We then performed a variety of analyses to determine whether these domains might constitute a reasonable model for the comprehensive evaluation of sexual offenders. Analyses indicated that overall the model received a moderate level of support.