Journal of Advanced Academics

The self-correcting nature of psychological and educational science has been seriously questioned. Recent special issues of Perspectives on Psychological Science and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts have roundly condemned current organizational models of research and dissemination and have criticized the perverse incentive structure that tempts researchers into generating and publishing false positive findings. At the same time, replications are rarely attempted, allowing untruths to persist in the literature unchallenged. In this article, the editors of the Journal of Advanced Academics consider this situation and announce new policies for quantitative submissions. They are (a) an explicit call for replication studies; (b) new instructions directing reviewers to base their evaluation of a study’s merit on the quality of the research design, execution, and written description, rather than on the statistical significance of its results; and (c) an invitation to omit statistical hypothesis tests in favor of reporting effect sizes and their confidence limits.

Approximately one quarter of American students attend rural schools; however, the needs of these students are often overlooked in education policy despite well-documented limited financial resources and pervasive poverty. Relatively little is known about the experiences of gifted students in rural areas and even less about the teachers serving this population. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the rural-specific context to identify factors associated with rural teachers’ instructional decisions to deliver gifted curriculum with fidelity. More specifically, the study examined the experiences for teachers in rural schools when implementing a research-based language arts curriculum and how these experiences relate to fidelity of implementation. Findings suggest that rural-specific characteristics of gifted programming, limited resources, and time challenges present unique challenges for these gifted education teachers.

Asking questions to promote higher-level thinking is often promoted as a way to challenge students, especially talented readers, to think more deeply about text and share their thinking. Recent research in a variety of educational fields has indicated that follow-up questions may be used to move all students forward in their abilities to understand and respond to such questions accessing higher-level thinking. The purpose of this qualitative investigation was to identify the types of follow-up questions frequently asked by three teachers at a small, urban elementary school in the Northeastern region of the United States and whether those types varied by students’ reading readiness levels. Results indicated that the teachers asked a variety of follow-up questions accessing both higher- and lower-level thinking during reading conferences with students whose reading levels varied; the results also indicated that each teacher tended to ask a greater percentage of higher-level questions of his or her higher-level students than of other students. The identified follow-up question types may be helpful in supporting other elementary reading teachers to expand their repertoire of questions to ask students during discourse around text.

Enriched high school curricula like the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate Diploma programs are endorsed as “pathway programs” for postsecondary-bound students. Program participation is perceived to have benefits that appeal to a broad stakeholder group of universities, administrators, teachers, students, and parents. In this systematic review, we aim to establish what is known about program experiences by synthesizing pertinent qualitative research on student participation. We identified 20 relevant articles that were published up to July 2013 in English and were listed in commonly accessible databases. Analytical themes explored include the impact of peer relationships, the impact of the teacher–student relationship, the conceptualization of success, the construction of self-image, and perceived preparation for the future. Based on our findings, we offer critical insights into the existing qualitative research and provide recommendations for future research.