Education researchers are deeply interested in understanding the way students organize their knowledge. Card sort tasks, which require students to group concepts, are one mechanism to infer a student's organizational strategy. However, the limited resolution of card sort tasks means they necessarily miss some of the nuance in a student's strategy.…

One of the proposed uses of cognitive diagnostic assessments is to classify the examinees as either masters or nonmasters on each of a number of skills being assessed. As with any test, it is important to report the quality of these binary classifications with measures of their reliability. Cui et al. and Wang et al. have suggested reliability…

Most of the existing classification accuracy indices of attribute patterns lose effectiveness when the response data is absent in diagnostic testing. To handle this issue, this article proposes new indices to predict the correct classification rate of a diagnostic test before administering the test under the deterministic noise input…

Surveys reveal that many school psychologists continue to employ cognitive profile analysis despite the long-standing history of negative research results from this class of practice. This begets the question: why do questionable assessment practices persist in school psychology? To provide insight on this dilemma, this article presents the…

This secondary analysis of data from a randomized control trial of an early mathematics intervention, ROOTS, explored whether patterns of intervention response were best categorized by the typical response/non-response binary or a more complex framework with additional response profiles. Participants included kindergarten students at risk for…

Behavioural and recent neural evidence indicates that young infants discriminate broad stimulus categories. However, little is known about the categorical perception of humans represented as full bodies with heads and their discrimination from inanimate objects. This study compares infants' brain processing of human and furniture pictures, probing…

Fluency is an important construct in clinical assessment and in cognitive taxonomies. In the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) model, Fluency is represented by several narrow factors that form a subset of the long-term memory encoding and retrieval (Glr) broad factor. The CHC broad classification of Fluency was evaluated in five data sets, and the CHC…

Poor comprehenders (PCs) are characterized by poor reading comprehension despite intact decoding and general cognitive ability. Poor word meaning knowledge is one of the earliest deficits associated with a PC profile. We examined processes underpinning word learning in PCs using a category learning paradigm. Adolescent participants (20 typically…

The purpose of the current investigation was to describe how the artificial neural networks (ANNs) can be used to interpret student performance on cognitive diagnostic assessments (CDAs) and evaluate the performances of ANNs using simulation results. CDAs are designed to measure student performance on problem-solving tasks and provide useful…

In classic category learning studies, subjects typically learn to assign items to 1 of 2 categories, with no further distinction between how items on each side of the category boundary should be treated. In real life, however, we often learn categories that dictate further processing goals, for instance, with objects in only 1 category requiring…

This study examines differences in English language comprehension, reading fluency, and executive functions among Spanish-English bilinguals with reading difficulties. Reading difficulties examined included general reading difficulties, defined by low word reading and reading comprehension, and specific-reading comprehension difficulties, defined…

This study examines differences in English language comprehension, reading fluency, and executive functions among Spanish-English bilinguals with reading difficulties. Reading difficulties examined included general reading difficulties, defined by low word reading and reading comprehension, and specific-reading comprehension difficulties, defined…

Classification consistency and accuracy are viewed as important indicators for evaluating the reliability and validity of classification results in cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA). Pattern-level classification consistency and accuracy indices were introduced by Cui, Gierl, and Chang. However, the indices at the attribute level have not yet…

Introduction: Studies of Dynamic Assessment of cognitive abilities reveal that young children profit from assistance while carrying out tasks that elicit cognitive effort. Dynamic assessment refers to a test format of a pretest-mediation-posttest in which the mediation phase includes scaffolding to assist the child to grasp the purpose of the…

Purpose: Of the three currently recognized variants of primary progressive aphasia, behavioral differentiation between the nonfluent/agrammatic (nfvPPA) and logopenic (lvPPA) variants is particularly difficult. The challenge includes uncertainty regarding diagnosis of apraxia of speech, which is subsumed within criteria for variant classification.…