Objective: The ability to form a strong therapeutic alliance is considered a foundational skill across psychotherapies. Patient-rated measures of the alliance are now being used to make judgments about a therapist's tendency to build alliances with their patients. However, whether a patient-rated alliance measure provides a useful index of a…

This study analyses peer assessment through many facet Rasch model (MFRM). The research was performed with 91 undergraduate students and with lecturer teaching the course. The research data were collected with holistic rubric employed by 6 peers and the lecturer in rating the projects prepared by 85 students taking the course. This study analyses…

Early childhood educators play a critical role in preparing students for success later in their school experience. The instructional techniques, emotional supports, and assessment approaches for early childhood settings are different from classroom settings in later grades. How can states and districts develop evaluation systems that are tuned to…

We estimated the invariance of educational achievement (EA) and learning attitudes (LA) measures across nations. A multi-group confirmatory factor analysis was used to estimate the invariance of educational achievement and learning attitudes across 55 nations (Programme for International Student Assessment [PISA] 2006 data, N = 354,203). The…

Three UK studies on the relationship between a purpose-built instrument to assess the importance and development of 15 "soft skills" are reported. "Study 1" (N = 444) identified strong latent components underlying these soft skills, such that differences "between-skills" were over-shadowed by differences…

Redistributing highly effective teachers from low- to high-need schools is an education policy tool that is at the center of several major current policy initiatives. The underlying assumption is that teacher productivity is portable across different schools settings. Using elementary and secondary school data from North Carolina and Florida, this…

This paper takes a close look at India's literacy rate by exploring whether the officially "literate" can read and at what level. In a large sample, aged 7+, drawn from four Hindi-speaking states, two methods were used to measure literacy. One was the standard Census Method (CM) which relies on self-reporting and the other was a Reading…

The Head Start Family and Child Experiences Survey (FACES) was first launched in 1997 as a periodic longitudinal study of program performance. Successive nationally representative samples of Head Start children, their families, classrooms, and programs provide descriptive information on the population served; staff qualifications, credentials,…

This report is based on the assessment of ICT (information and communication technology) literacy conducted in October 2005. It describes the development of a computer-based tool for assessing ICT literacy among school students and the application of that tool with a nationally representative sample of approximately 7,400 students from Years 6 and…