Creativity is highly valued in both education and the workforce, but assessing and developing creativity can be difficult without psychometrically robust and affordable tools. The open-ended nature of creativity assessments has made them difficult to score, expensive, often imprecise, and therefore impractical for school- or district-wide use. To…

There is now considerable evidence regarding the types of interventions that are effective at remediating reading disabilities on average. It is generally unclear, however, what predicts the magnitude of individual-level change following a given intervention. We examine new predictors of intervention gains that are theoretically grounded in…

The overarching goal of this 2-phase study was to investigate the contributions of relational reasoning to mathematical thinking and performance for 790 primary and middle-school Chinese students. Phase I of the study was undertaken to establish the reliability and validity of the Test of Relational Reasoning-Junior (TORRjr), a 32-item measure…

The present study examined issues pertaining to the reliability of writing assessment in the elementary grades, and among samples of struggling and nonstruggling writers. The present study also extended nascent research on the reliability and the practical applications of automated essay scoring (AES) systems in Response to Intervention frameworks…

Research indicates the need to further examine the dimensions of reading motivation. A clear theoretical basis is necessary for conceptualizing reading motivation and considering contextual differences therein. The present study develops and validates the SRQ-Reading Motivation, a questionnaire measuring recreational and academic reading…

Changes in the demands posed by increasingly complex workplaces in the 21st century have raised the importance of nonroutine skills such as complex problem solving (CPS). However, little is known about the antecedents and outcomes of CPS, especially with regard to malleable external factors such as classroom climate. To investigate the relations…

Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,312) were analyzed to examine whether the adverse effects of early insensitive parenting on children's academic functioning can be offset by parents' later involvement in children's education. Observations of mothers' early…

Academic self-concept is consistently proven to be multidimensional rather than unidimensional as it is domain specific in nature. However, each specific self-concept domain may be further separated into competence and affect components. This study examines the twofold multidimensionality of academic self-concept (i.e., its domain specificity and…

Models of personal epistemology have not been sufficiently integrated despite conceptual similarities. We attempted to model both dimensional and positional aspects of personal epistemology, as well as examine the domain specificity of these phenomena. The conceptual framework for this study was a new model of epistemic and ontological cognitive…

The Motivations for Reading Questionnaire (MRQ) contains 54 items that are posited to tap 11 dimensions of reading motivation. The structural validity of the MRQ was investigated with 2 samples: (a) 328 students in Grades 3-5 from 2 suburban mid-Atlantic elementary schools and (b) 735 students in Grades 3-5 in 2 suburban southwestern elementary…

The validity of cloze as a measure of intersentential comprehension (across-sentence information integration) was studied with 281 fifth graders by comparing it with a second measure expressly designed to assess such comprehension. Results suggest that cloze scores may reflect intersentential comprehension sufficiently to warrant their continued…

Teachers' ratings of children's academic abilities, classroom skills, and personal-social characteristics were highly predictive of subsequent school achievement. Although teachers tended to be more positive toward girls, within each sex ratings were predictive of future performance. Teacher ratings were more predictive of scholastic success than…

To examine the validity of distinguishing children with reading disabilities according to discrepancy and low-achievement definitions, 4 assessments of expected achievement and 2 of actual achievement were obtained for 199 elementary school students. Results do not support the validity of the discrepancy versus the low-achievement definition.…

The construct validity of a new measure of children's exposure to print, the Title Recognition Test (TRT), was assessed with 34 fourth, 33 fifth, and 67 sixth graders. The TRT demonstrated significant correlations with spelling, vocabulary, verbal fluency, word knowledge, and general information. (SLD)

Low-achieving second graders experienced a year of transactional strategies instruction (n=30) or highly regarded, more conventional second-grade reading instruction (n=30). The group receiving transactional strategies instruction had greater strategy awareness and use, greater acquisition of material read, and superior performance on standardized…