Background: Accurate and meaningful assessment of language and communication skills to monitor child progress is the cornerstone to appropriate intervention for children with complex communication needs (CCN; Brady et al., 2016; Rowland et al., 2012). Despite this need, there is a lack of high quality and validated measurement of young children…

Semantic distance is increasingly used for automated scoring of originality on divergent thinking tasks, such as the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Despite some psychometric support for semantic distance -- including positive correlations with human creativity ratings -- additional work is needed to optimize its reliability and validity, including…

This corpus-driven study explores the linguistics phenomenon of mental verbs in English song lyrics from 1960s until 2000s. This study aims to identify the frequency distributions of lexical verbs, mental verbs, and to analyze the language uses of mental verbs in the Diachronic Corpus of English Song Lyrics (DCOESL). Quantitative and qualitative…

Purpose: Recovery from aphasia is thought to depend on neural plasticity, that is, functional reorganization of surviving brain regions such that they take on new or expanded roles in language processing. To make progress in characterizing the nature of this process, we need feasible, reliable, and valid methods for identifying language regions of…

Since probability is a new topic at the primary school level in many countries, many primary school teachers may consider themselves not well prepared or may not value the formative role of probability as a topic for their students to learn. Consequently, the assessment of teachers' attitudes using valid and reliable instruments is a preliminary…

Coding is a process of assigning meaning to a given piece of evidence. Evidence may be found in a variety of data types, including documents, research interviews, posts from social media, conversations from learning platforms, or any source of data that may provide insights for the questions under qualitative study. In this study, we focus on text…

This study presents a new approach for transforming the latent representation derived from a Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) space into one where dimensions have nonlatent meanings. These meanings are based on lexical descriptors, which are selected by the LSA user. The authors present three analyses that provide examples of the utility of this…

The student-centred, progressive paradigm has not had sustained success in changing teacher-centred, formalistic practices in "developing" country classrooms. Does "Gestalt-switch" and paradigm reversal demonstrate that progressive theory has realigned with formalistic reality, or has it remained axiomatic in the research and…

This study aimed at investigating the effect of two strategies of teaching reading: 'semantic mapping' and 'question generation' on the reading achievement of a sample of 40 female students enrolling in two classes in Level 2 English as a Second Language Foundation Program at the Community College of Qatar. The researcher of the current study…

This study examined how explicit instruction in semantic ambiguity detection affected the reading comprehension and metalinguistic awareness of five English learners (ELs) with learning difficulties (e.g., attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, specific learning disability). A multiple probe across participants design (Gast & Ledford, 2010)…

IMPACCT is an online survey covering over 40 self-report types of student communication competency, as well as a test of critical thinking based on cognitive problem-solving. The student nominates two peers who rate the student's interpersonal, computer-mediated, group and leadership, and public speaking communication competence. The student takes…

This study explores the psychometric properties of data drawn from the Korean translation of the full "Scales of Independent Behavior--Revised" (SIB-R). In addition, semantic, content, conceptual, and technical equivalence are examined. The participants include 2,763 typically developing children and 406 children with intellectual…

The demand for good instructional environments presupposes valid and reliable analytical instruments for educational research. This paper introduces the "SMD Technology" (Surface, Matching, Deep Structure), which measures relational, structural, and semantic levels of graphical representations and concept maps. The reliability and validity of the…

Two studies were conducted to reexamine the psychometric properties of two major scales measuring attitudes toward older adults. The Kogan Attitudes Toward Old People Scale (Kogan OP Scale; Kogan, 1961b) was administered to a sample of 512 college students in Study One. The refined version (Polizzi & Millikin, 2002) of the Aging Semantic…

The PLS-4 (Preschool Language Scale, 4th edition) is a psychometrically sound instrument constructed to assess language skills in children from birth to 6 years 11 months. It is a useful diagnostic and research tool that can be used to identify current comprehension and expressive language skills and can measure changes in language skills over…