Assessments represent an important component of undergraduate courses because they affect how students interact with course content and gauge student achievement of course objectives. To make decisions on assessment design, instructors must understand the affordances and limitations of available question formats. Here, we use a crossover…

In this paper, we examine the concept definitions a group of South African upper secondary school mathematics teachers (N = 47) express and how their understanding of the truth value, the role of variable and the syntax of expression appear in the participants' explanations for their assessment of examples and non-examples of equations. We use…

The current study was designed to investigate children's memory and suggestibility for events differing in valence (positive or negative) and veracity (true or false). A total of 82 3- and 5-year-olds were asked repeated questions about true and false events, either in a grouped order (i.e., all questions about a certain event asked consecutively)…

The discrimination of the onset of joint control is an important interpretive tool in explaining matching behavior and other complex phenomena, but the difficulty of getting experimental control of all relevant variables stands in the way of a definitive experiment. The studies in the present issue of "The Analysis of Verbal Behavior" illustrate…

To study sex differences in test performance, the performance of males and females on 16 General Certificate of Education exams was analyzed in England. Results show that males perform better on objective tests than females. (Author/JJD)

We examined the correlation between sex and cognitive outcomes of a national sample of students at four-year institutions. Outcomes data included objective tests and self-reported gains. In the presence of controls for a wide variety of potentially confounding variables, significant differences were found between women and men in outcomes and in…

Examines generally high life satisfaction of 58 elderly reservation American Indians and its relationship to selected internal and external environmental factors. Suggests that internal environmental variables may be useful indicators of life satisfaction and that subjective measures of life satisfaction may be more predictive of mental health…

Experimental results indicate test items taken individually discriminate strongly between abused and well-adjusted children, but not between abused and nonabused disturbed children. Items used collectively discriminate between abused children and the other two groups. Based on these results, this test is proposed to identify abused children.…

Data from 77 ninth-grade Spanish students who took an objective test, a performance assessment, and a measure of perceptions of control indicate that control perceptions predict scores on performance assessments, not objective tests. Performance assessments thus reflect motivational variables beyond the constructs being tested. (SK)