The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) is a high stakes summative assessment that was designed to measure pre-service teacher readiness. We examined the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of trained PACT evaluators who rated 19 candidates. As measured by Cohen's weighted kappa, the overall IRR estimate was 0.17 (poor strength of…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

The main thrust of California's Ryan Act (1970) has been to terminate credential qualifications by verification of credit received from an institution of higher education and move towards the competency based professional preparation program where institutions are first authorized to offer such programs and then assigned the responsibility to…

To determine the feasibility of employing women as state traffic officers (STOs), the California Highway Patrol (CHP) conducted a two-year study. The CHP employed forty-one women and forty-two men as traffic officers and gave them the standard sixteen-week training given all new officers. After graduation, the officers were assigned to highway…