We examine the influence of inferring interlocutors' referential intentions from their body movements at the early stage of lexical acquisition. By testing human participants and comparing their performances in different learning conditions, we find that those embodied intentions facilitate both word discovery and word-meaning association. In…

The authors investigated whether emotional pictorial stimuli are especially likely to be processed in parafoveal vision. Pairs of emotional and neutral visual scenes were presented parafoveally (2.1[degrees] or 2.5[degrees] of visual angle from a central fixation point) for 150-3,000 ms, followed by an immediate recognition test (500-ms delay).…

Research on children's understanding of emotion has rarely focused on children from nonindustrialised countries, who may develop an understanding at different ages as compared to children reared in industrialised countries. Quechua children from an agro-pastoralist village were given an adapted version of the Test of Emotion Comprehension (TEC) to…

The study of mental diseases and the mentally ill is, no doubt, the job of psychiatry and clinical psychology. However, social psychology has also made a substantial contribution to research in this field in the past few decades. In this study, the authors describe and analyze the content and structure of representations of the mentally ill among…

The purpose of this report is to provide descriptive data regarding the test scores of Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) students in grades 4, 8 and 10 in reading, math, and science, as reported to the School Choice Demonstration Project 2008-2009. The tables, graphs, and histograms presented in this paper provide a snapshot of these…

The article discusses issues relating to the international use of personality inventories, especially those in which organizations make comparisons between people from differing cultures or countries or those with different languages. The focus is on the issue of norming and the use of national versus multinational norms. It is noted that…

The U.S. Department of Education has not yet published an official guidance document for using NAEP achievement level scores to confirm state testing results. A review of the literature, however, identified four principles that inform the valid use of NAEP scores in a confirming analysis. The principles address the appropriate NAEP statistics to…

Since the passage of the first Charter School Law in Minnesota in 2001, there have been many studies that have examined the effect of Charter schools on student achievement with very mixed results. The Missouri legislature passed legislation in 1998 permitting the establishment of charter schools in a metropolitan school district or in an urban…

The number of online education courses available to those seeking higher education have been increasing exponentially, offering opportunities to students who would not otherwise have been able to do so, as well as offering options for those who may have been able to attend classes on campus, but would prefer to pursue their course of study at…

Differential item functioning (DIF) continues to receive attention both in applied and methodological studies. Because DIF can be an indicator of irrelevant variance that can influence test scores, continuing to evaluate and improve the accuracy of detection methods is an essential step in gathering score validity evidence. Methods for detecting…

The National Academy of Education Panel is providing the intellectual leadership and coordination for an independent evaluation of the 1990 and 1992 Trial State Assessments (TSA) of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). These instruments provide state-by-state comparisons of educational achievement, which is the first such use of…

A group of highly regarded schools in affluent suburban areas was divided into two groups: those judged to have a traditional orientation and those judged to have a more experimental orientation, in terms of course and program structure. A review of the mean Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) from the 1966, 1969, 1973, and 1976 graduating classes from…

During the 1974-75 school year, all second and third grade pupils in California were tested in reading achievement, and all pupils in grades 6 and 12 were tested in the basic skills of reading, written expression, and mathematics. The Reading Test: Second and Third Grades was the instrument used to assess reading achievement; it was developed…

This study examines the appropriateness of a large-scale state standards-based English-Language Arts (ELA) assessment for students who are deaf or hard of hearing by comparing the internal test structures for these students to students without disabilities. The Grade 4 and 8 ELA assessments were analyzed via a series of parcel-level exploratory…

Title I provides extra instructional services designed to raise achievement for low-performing students in schools with relatively high poverty rates, and for all students in many of the nation's highest-poverty schools. To learn more about how well Title I students are performing academically, the Center on Education Policy (CEP) compared…