The focus of this paper is on the empirical relationship between item difficulty and item discrimination. Two studies--an empirical investigation and a simulation study--were conducted to examine the association between item difficulty and item discrimination under classical test theory and item response theory (IRT), and the effects of the…

Childhood adversity can lead to cognitive deficits or enhancements, depending on many factors. Though progress has been made, two challenges prevent us from integrating and better understanding these patterns. First, studies commonly use and interpret raw performance differences, such as response times, which conflate different stages of cognitive…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

This study aimed to examine the relationship between student engagement and student retention of adult learners at community colleges. The relationship between student retention and the five Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) student engagement benchmarks (active and collaborative learning, student effort, academic challenge,…

Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and preintervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment.…

One of the most widely used communication tools in evaluation is the logic model. Despite its extensive use, there has been little research into the visualization aspect of the logic model. To assess the impact that design modifications would have on its effectiveness, we applied established visualization principles to revise a program model.…

Analyzing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) plays a crucial role in understanding the impacts of educational interventions. A standard practice for HTE analysis is to examine interactions between treatment status and pre-intervention participant characteristics, such as pretest scores, to identify how different groups respond to treatment.…

The study examines language dimensions of mathematical word problems and the classification of mathematical word problems according to these dimensions with unsupervised machine learning (ML) techniques. Previous research suggests that the language dimensions are important for mathematical word problems because it has an influence on the…

This study investigated categorization of perfectionism subtypes for Chinese undergraduates and the effects of perfectionism subtypes on career outcomes based on two prominent, competing models of perfectionism, the tripartite model and 2 × 2 model. Indices of career outcome were defined with career adaptability (positive) and career…

Enzyme kinetics is the study of enzymatic catalytic rates in biochemical reactions. This topic is commonly taught to life science students in introductory biochemistry courses during their undergraduate education. Unlike most other biochemistry topics, which focus on visual structures of biomolecules and their processes, enzyme kinetics is…

Recently, interest in test subscore reporting for diagnosis purposes has been growing rapidly. The two simulation studies here examined factors (sample size, number of subscales, correlation between subscales, and three factors affecting subscore reliability: number of items per subscale, item parameter distribution, and data generating model)…

I propose an integrative theoretical framework for reading and writing acquisition, called the interactive dynamic literacy model, after reviewing theoretical models of reading and writing, and recent efforts in integrating theoretical models within reading and writing, respectively. The central idea of the interactive dynamic literacy model is…

The RI-Val model of comprehension includes a validation process in which linkages formed by integration are matched against active memory. In five experiments, we investigated factors that influence validation. Reading times were measured on target sentences that contained either correct information or semantically related, but incorrect content.…

Constituting a metacognitive strategy, system competence or systems thinking can only assume its assigned key function as a basic concept for the school subject of geography in Germany after a theoretical and empirical foundation has been established. A measurement instrument is required which is suitable both for supporting students and for the…

After explicit instruction on how to give possible bidirectional (two-way) causality explanations for a correlation, 240 students from eight sections of social psychology and research methods courses wrote "reverse causality" explanations on various test questions, creating a total of 882 answers. Averaging across multiple graded…