With the recent influx of Latinos into the United States, it is essential to understand how their backgrounds and cultures will affect the way they view their children's emotional, social, and educational development. Researchers continue to evaluate the psychometrics of various screening instruments in order to ensure a reliable and valid…

The breadth and depth of education within physical therapy continues to expand as the profession develops; in fact, entry-level physical therapist education has transitioned from the bachelor to doctorate level. However, physical therapist assistant education has remained at the associate degree level despite increasing professional…

Accountability for student achievement is required by legislation and demanded by the public. Testing is the method of choice for determining student achievement and for informing teachers, parents and students about what students know and still need to learn. State tests that meet the demands of federal legislation have far-reaching consequences…

The purpose of this study was to determine which of three competing models will provide, reliable, interpretable, and responsive measures of elementary students' understanding of the nature of science (NOS). The Nature of Science Instrument-Elementary (NOSI-E), a 28-item Rasch-based instrument, was used to assess students' NOS…

This dissertation establishes the utility and reliability of a statistical distance measure for syntactic dialectometry, expanding dialectometry's methods to include syntax as well as phonology and the lexicon. It establishes the measure's reliability by comparing its results to those of dialectology and phonological dialectometry on Swedish…

This study provided a preliminary analysis of concurrent and discriminative validity for the "Early Literacy Progress Monitoring Assessment Tool" (ELP-MAT; Kaderavek, 2009). Sixty preschool students between the ages of 3 years, 6 months and 5 years of age, from early childhood programs in Northwest Ohio, participated in the study. The…

Holland's theory of six work personalities has become a staple of vocational psychology, providing a robust and simple model for understanding the structure of vocational interests. Though Holland's types provide a common vocabulary for vocational psychologists working with a variety of populations, until this point there has not been a measure of…

Instructors in electrical and computer engineering and in computer science have developed innovative methods to teach digital logic circuits. These methods attempt to increase student learning, satisfaction, and retention. Although there are readily accessible and accepted means for measuring satisfaction and retention, there are no widely…