Learners' feelings of social connectedness may be a key factor in predicting online course success. However, students attempting to perceive and process the social context in online courses often find themselves engaging in unfamiliar, technology-mediated communication channels. While there have been several empirically based strategies published…

For educational achievement tests that employ multiple-choice (MC) items and aim to reliably classify students into performance categories, it is critical to design MC items that are capable of discriminating student performance according to the stated achievement levels. This is accomplished, in part, by clearly understanding how item design…

The Bologna Declaration brought reforms into higher education that imply changes in teaching methods, didactic materials and textbooks, infrastructures and laboratories, etc. Statistics and mathematics are disciplines that traditionally have the worst success rates, particularly in non-mathematics core curricula courses. This research project,…

The development of the Army Intern Intake Survey (AIIS) is described. The AIIS focuses on the Army civilian intern program, a vehicle for entry-level employees to progress in Army civilian jobs, which produces a profile of past and current interns. The AIIS will identify changes in intern quality over time and will make comparisons of Army interns…

This paper highlights the expressed educational attitudes and learning orientations of students who participated in a recent eight-college pilot study (total N = 4279). The Student Orientations Survey (S.O.S.), a ten-scale inventory developed by R.M. Gray and this writer, was used in this project in order to assess student's attitudes towards…

Six item bias detection techniques (distractor analysis, the Mantel-Haenszel procedure, Angoff's delta plot, Angoff's modified delta plot, Stricker's partial correlation index, and direct comparison of item difficulties) were compared for their ability to identify biased items at three stages of test development. The techniques were applied to…