In recent years, readability formulas have gained new prominence as a basis for selecting texts for learning and assessment. Variables that quantitative tools count (e.g., word frequency, sentence length) provide valid measures of text complexity insofar as they accurately predict representative and high-quality criteria. The longstanding…

Previous characterizations of rumination do not account for why a reflective style of ruminative response to negative mood, as opposed to a brooding style, is linked with greater creativity--especially when indecision is high. Moreover, less is known about ruminative responses to positive mood. The purpose of this investigation is to demonstrate…

During the transition period between the use of exclusively old SAT® scores and the use of exclusively new SAT scores, college admission offices will be receiving both types of scores from students. Making an admission decision based on new SAT scores can be challenging at first because institutions have methods, procedures, and models based on…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce and develop the methodology of journal benchmarking. Design/Methodology/ Approach: The journal benchmarking method is understood to be an analytic procedure of continuous monitoring and comparing of the advance of specific journal(s) against that of competing journals in the same subject area,…

Data from the School Success Profile generated by 19,228 middle and high school students were organized into three broad categories of risk and protective factors--control, support, and challenge--to examine the relative and combined power of aggregate scale scores in each category so as to predict academic success. It was hypothesized that higher…

There is currently a nursing shortage in the United States. By 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects, the number of job openings for Practical Nurses (PN) will be 168,500, an increase of 25% over 2012 (BLS, 2014). Nursing education does not currently meet present, much less future needs. Nursing programs have limited space; according…

This Center for American Progress report examines whether states' adoption of standards-based policies predicts low-income students' NAEP achievement trends in fourth and eighth grade math and reading throughout the 2003-2013 decade. The report claims to analyze changes across five separate two-year intervals, but it only reports findings for…

Students routinely ignore negative feedback regarding their performances early in college science courses. In this study we analyzed the extent to which two standard forms of feedback, midterm and first-exam grades, correlated with final grades in several biology courses. The courses ranged from an introductory course for nonmajors to upper…

The purpose of this study was to assess the merit of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal as a pre-admission criterion in conjunction with the frequently utilized admission criteria of the college prerequisite grade point average and the National League of Nursing pre-admission test. Data were collected from 192 first-year nursing…

The use and validity of the Graduate Record Examination General Test (GRE) to predict the success of graduate school applicants is heavily debated, especially for its possible impact on the selection of underrepresented minorities into science, technology, engineering, and math fields. To better identify candidates who would succeed in our program…

This study examines grade expectations of two groups of business students for their final course mark. We separate students that are on average "better" forecasters on the basis of them not making significant forecast errors during the semester from those students that are poor forecasters of their final grade. We find that the better…

This study describes the use of a collaborative learning approach in a psychological statistics course and examines the factors that predict which students benefit most from such an approach in terms of learning outcomes. In a course format with a substantial group work component, 166 students were surveyed on their preference for individual…

This study further examined the reliability and validity of the Learning Alliance Inventory (LAI), a self-report measure designed to assess the working alliance between a student and a teacher. The LAI was found to have good internal consistency and test--retest reliability, and it demonstrated the predicted convergence with measures of immediacy…

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…

Data from the ALEKS-based placement program at the University of Illinois is presented visually in several ways. The placement exam (an ALEKS assessment) contains precise item-specific information and the data show many interesting properties of the student populations of the placement courses, which include Precalculus, Calculus, and Business…