District costs for teachers' health insurance are, on average, higher then employer costs for private-sector professionals. How much of this is attributable to collective bargaining? This article examines the question using data from the National Compensation Survey (NCS) of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the state of Wisconsin. In…

A recent comparative analysis of alternative interval estimation approaches and procedures has shown that confidence intervals (CIs) for true raw scores determined with the Score method--which uses the normal approximation to the binomial distribution--have actual coverage probabilities that are closest to their nominal level. It has also recently…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between motor proficiency and body mass index (BMI) in preschool children. Thirty-eight children ages 4-6 years had their BMI calculated and were assessed using the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 (MABC-2; Henderson, Sugden, & Barnett, 2007). These data were analyzed in two…

The aim of this study was to examine the responsiveness of the Psychoeducational Profile-third edition (PEP-3) in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). We investigated the responsiveness in terms of three types of scores (i.e., raw scores, developmental ages, and percentile ranks) of the subtests and composites of the PEP-3 and three…

The current study uses a crossed random-effects item response model to simultaneously examine both reader and word characteristics and interactions between them that predict the reading of 39 morphologically complex words for 221 middle school students. Results suggest that a reader's ability to read a root word (e.g., "isolate") predicts that…

This study examined the effect of hormonal fluctuations on women's performance on sexually dimorphic cognitive tasks. Thirty-six participants were recruited through introduction to psychology courses at three colleges. Participants were assessed using the Woodcock-Johnson Test of Cognitive Ability III (WJ III COG), which is a commonly-used, widely…

Background: Children with cerebral palsy (CP) are at greater risk for a limited intellectual development than typically developing children. Little information is available which children with CP are most at risk. This study aimed to describe the development of non-verbal intellectual capacity of school-age children with CP and to examine the…

This study was designed to test the intra- and inter-rater reliability of the University of North Carolina's Balance Error Scoring System in 9- and 10-year-old children. Additionally, a modified version of the Balance Error Scoring System was tested to determine if it was more sensitive in this population ("raw scores"). Forty-six…

We use visualization to find patterns in educational data. We represent student scores from high-stakes exams as flow vectors in fluids, define two types of streamlines and trajectories, and show that differences between streamlines and trajectories are due to regression to the mean. This issue is significant because it determines how quickly…

Engagement has evolved from concerns of "access," "diversity," and "public service" between the academy and communities. Land-grant institutions (LGI), considered the "public's universities," have represented a unique population in American higher education with their historic 150-year tradition of teaching, research, and service. Carnegie…

In the year 2001, the University Grants Commission of Sri Lanka successfully appealed to change the method of determining the cut-off scores for university admissions from raw scores to standardized z-scores. This standardization allegedly eliminated the discrepancy caused due to the assumption of equal difficulty levels across all subjects. This…

The majority of large-scale assessments develop various score scales that are either linear or nonlinear transformations of raw scores for better interpretations and uses of assessment results. The current formula for coefficient alpha (a; the commonly used reliability coefficient) only provides internal consistency reliability estimates of raw…

Background: The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) is a parent-completed screening questionnaire often used to measure autism spectrum disorders (ASD) severity. Although child characteristics are known to influence scores from other ASD-symptom measures, as well as parent-questionnaires more broadly, there has been limited consideration of how…

Detecting unusual similarity in the item responses of a pair of examinees usually conditions on the pair's overall test performance (e.g., raw scores). Doing this, however, often requires assumptions about the invariance of other examinee pair characteristics. In this study, we examined the appropriateness of such assumptions about selected…

The study reported here examined the efficacy of a small group (Tier 2 in a three-tier Response to Intervention model) literacy intervention for older low-progress readers (in Years 3-6). This article focuses on the second phase of a two-phase, crossover randomized control trial involving 26 students. In Phase 1, the experimental group (E1)…