Curricular changes that promote undergraduate persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines are likely associated with particular student psychological outcomes, and tools are needed that effectively assess these developments. Here, we describe the theoretical basis, psychometric properties, and predictive…

The objective of this study was to validate a scale for assessment of academic projects. As a complement, we examined its predictive ability by comparing the scores of advised/corrected projects based on the model and the final scores awarded to the work by an examining panel (approximately 10 months after the project design). Results of…

College students ("N" = 215) completed a self-report instrument designed to assess different regulation of motivation strategies as well as aspects of their motivational beliefs, use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies, and procrastination. The study serves to extend the research on the self-regulation of motivation…

In a provocative and influential paper, Jesse Rothstein (2010) finds that standard value added models (VAMs) suggest implausible future teacher effects on past student achievement, a finding that obviously cannot be viewed as causal. This is the basis of a falsification test (the Rothstein falsification test) that appears to indicate bias in VAM…

This study was designed to identify the help seeking behaviors of preservice teachers who are at risk for failure of state certification examinations through use of a scale adapted to the arena of teacher education, the Preservice Teacher Help Seeking Scales (PTHSS). In the past, self-report measures of help seeking behavior patterns have been…

The "Ohio Youth Problems, Functioning, and Satisfaction Scales" (Ohio Scales) are a recently developed set of measures designed to be a brief, practical assessment of changes in behavior over time in children and adolescents. The authors explored the convergent validity of the Ohio Scales by examining the relationship between the scales and…

In comparison with other predictors as intelligence, aptitude, interest, and personality, biographical items had vastly superior validity. (Author)

Study is concerned with an item analysis of 465 Integration Level Test Series items in an attempt to develop a delinquency predictor scale for the test series. (Authors)

The predictive analysis approach to adaptive testing originated in the idea of statistical predictive analysis suggested by J. Aitchison and I.R. Dunsmore (1975). The adaptive testing model proposed is based on parameter-free predictive distribution. Aitchison and Dunsmore define statistical prediction analysis as the use of data obtained from an…

A tailored testing model employing the beta distribution, whose mean equals the difficulty of an item and whose variance is approximately equal to the sampling variance of the item difficulty, and employing conditional item difficulties, is proposed. (Author)

This paper reports the results of using a three-layer backpropagation artificial neural network to predict item difficulty in a reading comprehension test. Two network structures were developed, one with and one without a sigmoid function in the output processing unit. The data set, which consisted of a table of coded test items and corresponding…

The purpose of this study was to construct and validate a self-rating scale which can be easily administered and quickly scored for discriminating between those high school students who will dropout and those who will not. A 34-item scale was constructed for subjects with a fifth grade reading level. This scale was administered to 113 high school…

A measure of the extent to which the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey (KOIS) was predictive of occupational membership for an individual was correlated with KOIS item and scale scores. Results indicated that the KOIS was a moderator of its own predictive validity. (Author/JKS)

A procedure for scoring multiple-choice tests by assigning different weights to every option of a test item is investigated. The weighting method used was based on that proposed by Davis, which involves taking the upper and lower 27% of a sample, according to some criterion measure, and using the percentages of these groups marking an item option…

A sample of 593 pilot trainees in Officer Training School were administered the Strong Vocational Interest Blank and the Officer Biographical and Attitudinal Survey. Their performance in pilot training was monitored in order to assess the effectiveness of biographical, attitudinal, and interest data in predicting pilot training criteria. Using…