This article is a response to commentaries on the article, "Microvariation in Multilingual Situations: The Importance of Property-by-Property Acquisition" (EJ1300541). This response is divided into sections focusing on the following issues: (1) full transfer and the notion of copying; (2) the definition of linguistic proximity; (3) some…

McGrath presents a prototyping proposal to better classify character education programs. He proposes 7 key elements that can facilitate identifying more and less typical programs. This proposal appears to be a very good start for improving the organization of the character education field and facilitating research. This commentary highlights 4…

Robert McGrath (this issue) has proposed a useful way of bringing the field closer to a consensual definition of character education. We support much of his proposal. Like McGrath, we believe the goal of character education should be to increase the expression of qualities that benefit one's self and others. We also agree that character education…

Robert McGrath's article has the great virtue of asking an important question: "What is character education?" He argues that currently "what it means to call something a character education program remains unclear." Without a clear definition, McGrath says, one cannot differentiate character education from other programs…

This commentary is derived from the five empirical articles that appeared in the April 2017 special issue on student engagement (Liem & Chong, 2017). Drawing on others' critiques of engagement theory and research, and with full appreciation for theoretical and disciplinary diversity, I provide a high altitude, inclusive perspective of each…

The author briefly responds to a number of terminological, theoretical, and empirical issues raised in some postscripts. The goal is not to respond to each outstanding point but rather to address some comments that in his view confuse rather than clarify matters. He responds to Plaut and McClelland and Quian Quiroga and Kreiman in turn.

In this commentary, the author points out few issues, one being that there are models mislabeled as diagnostic, which deal with linear decompositions of item difficulties rather than estimating multidimensional skill variables. The author discusses the issue that there are many new names for essentially well-known models for multiple simultaneous…

People with an intellectual disability have existed across human history, making up a part of all cultures. They represent a small part of the extremely wide variety of people in the human population at any one time. This review essay examines the 11th and latest Definition and Classification Manual published by the American Association on…

As Rupp and Templin (2008) stated directly, diagnostic classification methods "are confirmatory in nature." Methods, though, are neither inherently confirmatory nor exploratory. Diagnostic classification modeling, with its analytical and computational obstacles eventually yielding as a comprehensive and potent discipline emerges, will…

The paper by Rupp and Templin (2008) is an excellent work on the characteristics and features of cognitive diagnostic models (CDM). In this article, the authors comment on some substantial and methodological aspects of this focus paper. They organize their comments by going through issues associated with the terms "cognitive,"…

Paul Newton (2010), with his characteristic concern about theory, has set out two different ways of thinking about the basis upon which equivalences of one sort or another are established between test score scales. His reason for doing this is a desire to establish "the defensibility of linkages lower on the continuum than concordance."…

This article presents the author's rejoinder to thinking about linking from issue 8(1). Particularly within the more embracing linking frameworks, e.g., Holland & Dorans (2006) and Holland (2007), there appears to be a major disjunction between (1) classification discourse: the supposed basis for classification, that is, the underlying theory…

"Linking" is a term given to a general class of procedures by which one represents scores X on one test or measure in terms of scores Y on another test or measure. A recent taxonomy by Holland and Dorans (2006; Holland, 2007) organizes the various types of links into three broad categories: prediction, scale aligning, and equating. In…

Despite the general trend to embrace interdisciplinarity in post-secondary education, we remain remarkably unclear concerning what we mean by interdisciplinarity and how it is achieved. Reporting on research conducted in a team-taught interdisciplinary course, I propose a new way of conceptualizing interdisciplinary connections, grounded in…

The article "Thinking About Linking" by Newton (2010) presents a novel philosophical perspective on the way that educational assessments should be linked. Newton starts by describing the linking framework as it was characterized in various publications and identifies a cross-cultural dimension in the definitions and uses of test…