A key piece of a validity argument for a language assessment tool is clear overlap between assessment tasks and the target language use (TLU) domain (i.e., the domain description inference). The TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language (T2K-SWAL) corpus, which represents a variety of academic registers and disciplines in traditional…

Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has often been used to evaluate efficiency in the context of higher education institutions. Yet there are numerous alternative non-parametric measures of efficiency available. This paper compares efficiency scores obtained for institutions of higher education in England, 2013-2014, using three different methods: the…

Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) are widely used to measure speaking ability in a second or foreign language. The Michigan English Language Assessment Battery (MELAB) Speaking Test is an OPI used for academic and professional purposes around the world. However, little research on this or other OPIs has quantitatively compared test takers' speech…

As with other countries, Australia has been grappling with the identification, measurement and impact of disadvantage in higher education. In particular, the measurement of socio-economic status (SES) has been of central concern. The immediate solution in Australia has been the introduction of an "area" measure in which students' SES is…

Mentoring has received considerable attention from scholars, and in the relevant literature, a number of studies give reference to the mentoring programs developed at universities and to the mentoring relations in higher education. Yet, most of these studies either only have a theoretical basis or deal with the mentoring relationships between…

Most institutions of higher education have some system in place for collecting student ratings of instruction (SRI) data from classes on a systematic basis. SRIs are a relatively simple way of gauging student perceptions of teaching and the course. Since the initial development of IDEA SRI in 1975, much has changed about higher education. Many…

This study reports on the pedagogical implications of using the Blackboard feature Discussion Board (DB) to improve students' learning in higher education. The study sample included three sections of female students--a total of 155 students--in an undergraduate course at an international university in Saudi Arabia. The impact of using DB on…

The Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI) is used to examine teachers' teaching approaches in higher education. Analyses into the validity and reliability of the original English ATI yielded positive results. In this study, we examined the degree to which these positive results can also be found for the Dutch version that we developed. Data were…

Results are presented which suggest that the learning occurring between two sections of the Group Embedded Fiqures Test is independent of the order in which the sections are worked. (Author/GK)

Appplied formulae for estimating the validity of random short forms to Reynolds' data on six short forms of the Marlowe-Crowne. Results showed some, but not all, of the short forms considered by Reynolds were appreciably better than random. (JAC)

This study was designed to determine whether there are disparities in sex knowledge between hearing college freshmen at the University of Maryland (N=75) and Loyola College in Baltimore (N=128) and deaf college freshmen at Gallaudet University (N=38). The Sex Knowledge Inventory was administered along with the Knowledge portion of the Sex…

A study was conducted to further validate the "Watson-Barker Listening Test." The subjects, 120 students enrolled in basic speech courses, completed the Receiver Apprehension Test (RAT) and the Watson-Barker Listening Test: Form A. Statistical analysis of the results revealed a significant correlation between the RAT scores and both the…

To explore an interface of personality instruments divergent in focus and in method, all correlations between 18 measures from LaForge and Suczek's (1955) Interpersonal Check List (ICL) and 14 scores from Singer and Lommis' (1984) Inventory of Personality (SLIP), an ipsative Jungian-oriented questionnaire, were determined for 117 undergraduates.…

This study evaluates the relationship of the Career Occupational Preference System, Interest Inventory, Form P (COPS-P) and the Theme and Basic Interest scales of the Strong-Campbell Interest Inventory (SCII) to provide construct validity data. Computed scale correlations for a college student sample (n=122) support the theoretical constructs…