Purpose: The need for psychometrically sound measurement approaches to social work educational outcomes assessment is increasing. Method: The research reported here describes an original and two replication studies of a new scale (N = 550) designed to assess an individual's self-efficacy regarding social work competencies specified by the Council…

Objective: The purpose of this study was to test Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) constructs in predicting human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination behavioral intentions of vaccine-eligible college men. Participants: Participants were unvaccinated college men aged 18-26 years attending a large public university in the southeastern United States…

The selection and interpretation of individually administered norm-referenced cognitive tests that are administered to culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students continue to be an important consideration within the psychoeducational assessment process. Understanding test directions during the assessment of cognitive abilities is…

The increase in the cost of college textbooks together with the proliferation of digital content and devices has inspired the development of open textbooks, open educational resources that are free, openly licensed, and often peer-reviewed. Although several published studies have investigated the impact of open textbook adoption on educational…

Some individuals with developmental dyslexia are able to acquire age-appropriate reading comprehension abilities by the time they reach postsecondary education. This study explored the role that study strategies have with secondary students with dyslexia in achieving age-appropriate reading comprehension skills. The findings of this study…

A recent Educational Testing Services report (2016) found that international graduate students with a TOEFL score of 80--the minimum average TOEFL score for graduate admission in the United States--usually possess reading subscores of 20, equating to a 12th-grade reading comprehension level. However, one public flagship university's international…

The present study examined the technical adequacy of maze-selection tasks constructed in 2 different ways: typical versus novel. We selected distractors for each measure systematically based on rules related to the content of the passage and the part of speech of the correct choice. Participants included 262 middle school students who were…

The present study examined undergraduate students' multiple source use in response to two different types of academic questions, one discrete and one open-ended. Participants (N = 240) responded to two questions using a library of eight digital sources, varying in source type (e.g., newspaper article) and reliability (e.g., authors' credentials).…

This study of English as a second language (ESL) reading textbooks investigates cohesion in reading passages from 27 textbooks. The guiding research questions were whether and how cohesion differs across textbooks written for beginning, intermediate, and advanced second language readers. Using a computational tool called Coh-Metrix, textual…

Research has identified a number of linguistic features that influence the reading comprehension of young readers; yet, less is known about whether and how these findings extend to adult readers. This study examines text comprehension, processing, and familiarity judgment provided by adult readers using a number of different approaches (i.e.,…

This study investigated the complexity of leveled passages used in four classroom reading assessments. A total of 167 passages leveled for Grades 1-6 from these assessments were analyzed using four analytical tools of text complexity. More traditional, two-factor measures of text complexity found a general trend of fairly consistent across-grade…

Refutation texts have been shown to be effective at promoting knowledge revision. It has been suggested that refutation texts are most effective when the misconception and the correct information are co-activated and integrated with causal networks that support the correct information. We explored two augmentations to a refutation text that might…

This study sought to examine the development of paragraph writing skills of 116 English as a second language university students over the course of 12 weeks and the relationship between the linguistic features of students' written texts as measured by Coh-Metrix--a computational system for estimating textual features such as cohesion and…

Although college-aged women are at high risk for human papillomavirus (HPV) infection, many college women remain unvaccinated against HPV. Testing health behavior theory can assist sexuality educators in identifying behavioral antecedents to promote behavior change within an intervention. The purpose of this pilot study was to utilize social…

This study examined the effects of an intervention in writing with digital interactive books. To improve the writing skills of seventh- and eighth-grade students with a learning disability in reading, we conducted a quasi-experimental study in which the students read interactive digital books (i-books), took notes, wrote summaries, and acted as…