The development of a 20-item semantic differential assessment instrument for measuring student attitudes toward the subject of chemistry is described (Attitude toward the Subject of Chemistry Inventory-ASCI). Instrument subscales and survey items pertain to interest and utility, anxiety, intellectual accessibility, emotional satisfaction, and…

Causal statements from adults with learning disabilities and normally achieving adults were analyzed and organized within a linguistic taxonomy of causal semantic relations, and a relationship between Piagetian cognitive stages and verbal expressions of causality were identified. Piagetian principles were used to design assessment and intervention…

Latent semantic analysis (LSA) is an automated, statistical technique for comparing the semantic similarity of words or documents. In this article, I examine the application of LSA to automated essay scoring. I compare LSA methods to earlier statistical methods for assessing essay quality, and critically review contemporary essay-scoring systems…