Introductory statistics courses, which are important in preparing students for their daily lives, generally derive inferential statistics from informal knowledge. In this transition process, sampling distributions have an important place, yet research has shown that students often have difficulties with this concept. In order to increase their…

The study aims to examine whether differential item function is displayed in three different test forms that have item orders of random and sequential versions (easy-to-hard and hard-to-easy), based on Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT) methods and bearing item difficulty levels in mind. In the correlational research, the…

There is some disparity in the quality of education among the various races and provinces in South Africa. Since the dawn of democracy in 1994, the government has tried to bridge the gap using quintile categorisation of public schools and its concomitant funding. The categorisation is based on the socioeconomic status of the community in which the…

Despite evidence that many schools and districts have considerable discretion when hiring teachers and the existence of an extensive literature on teacher quality, little is known about how best to hire teachers. This is, in part, because predicting teacher quality using readily-observable teacher characteristics has proven difficult and there is…

Selection to programmes for gifted students in Israel, performed in the second grade, relies on raw ability and achievement test scores, irrespective of age, thereby ignoring the well-known effect of within-grade age differences on test scores. Employing the entire cohort of third graders of legal age (67,366 students, 1.4% of whom were enrolled…

The Florida Center for Reading Research (FCRR) Reading Assessment (FRA) consists of computer-adaptive reading comprehension and oral language screening tasks that provide measures to track growth over time, as well as a Probability of Literacy Success (PLS) linked to grade-level performance (i.e., the 50th percentile) on the reading comprehension…

Background: This study examined the impact of the reading-related affective factors "home environment" and school "environment" on predicting the likelihood of students being either high-proficiency or low-proficiency readers. Data from 3,875 Hong Kong SAR Grade 4 students participating in an international comparative…

We present evidence that the positive relationship between kindergarten entrance age and school achievement primarily reflects skill accumulation prior to kindergarten, rather than a heightened ability to learn in school among older children. The association between achievement test scores and entrance age appears during the first months of…