Educational reform priorities such as emphasis on quantitative modelling (QM) have positioned undergraduate biology instructors as designers of QM experiences to engage students in authentic science practices that support the development of data-driven and evidence-based reasoning. Yet, little is known about how biology instructors adapt to the…

Mixture IRT models address the heterogeneity in a population by extracting latent classes and allowing item parameters to vary between latent classes. Once the latent classes are extracted, they need to be further examined to be characterized. Some approaches have been adopted in the literature for this purpose. These approaches examine either the…

Introduction: The focus of our research converges on the analysis of attitudes and the prediction of the behavior of university students towards the inclusion of students with disabilities in university. The evaluation of attitudes and the prediction of behavior are complex, but it is fundamental because of the decisive impact they have on the…

The aim of this study is to determine whether the Happiness Fear Scale (FHS) developed by Joshanloo and Weijers (2014) is suitable for Turkish culture. For this purpose, validity and reliability of the scale were examined. The study consisted of 180 university students, 87 male and 23 female. The linguistic equivalence of the scale was made by…

A key question facing teacher evaluation systems is how to combine multiple measures of complex constructs into composite indicators of performance. We use data from the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study to investigate the measurement properties of composite indicators obtained under various conjunctive, disjunctive (or complementary),…

With the rapid developments in emerging technologies and the emphasis on technologies in learning environments, the connection between technologies and meaningful learning has strengthened. Developing an understanding of the components of meaningful learning with technology is pivotal, as this may enable educators to make more informed decisions…

Houston's experience with the Educational Value-Added Assessment System (R) (EVAAS) raises questions that other districts should consider before buying the software and using it for high-stakes decisions. Researchers found that teachers in Houston, all of whom were under the EVAAS gun, but who taught relatively more racial minority students,…

The Test of Gross Motor Development--Second Edition (TGMD-2) is a widely used evaluation tool of children's fundamental motor skills (FMS). This study illustrates how exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM) addresses current limitations associated with TGMD-2 factor structure. Using the normative dataset from the TGMD-2 manual, we test…

The literature on Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems has provided useful validation frameworks for any assessment that includes AES scoring. Furthermore, evidence for the scoring fidelity of AES systems is accumulating. Yet questions remain when appraising the scoring performance of AES systems. These questions include: (a) which essays are…

One interesting idea in social network analysis is the directionality test that utilizes the directions of social ties to help identify peer effects. The null hypothesis of the test is that if contextual factors are the only force that affects peer outcomes, the estimated peer effects should not differ, if the directions of social ties are…

Value has been identified as an essential aspect towards the quality in mathematics education at various levels of the system, institutional, curriculum, education management, and classroom interactions. However, few studies were focused on values, its development, measurement, and impact in education as compared to other affective aspects such as…

The Goodenough-Harris Drawing Test (GHDT) is a non-verbal assessment designed to infer young children's levels of intellectual development and understanding via the collection of three human figure drawings (HFDs)--one each of a man, a woman and a self-portrait. This paper presents findings from a research project that applied the Rasch model for…

This monograph provides an epistemological rational for the Accumulative Manifold Validation Analysis [also referred by the acronym "AMOVA"] statistical methodology designed to test psychometric instruments. This form of inquiry is a form of mathematical optimization in the discipline of linear stochastic modelling. AMOVA is an in-depth…

The Social Competence and Behavior Evaluation (SCBE), originally developed for assessing preschoolers, was adapted for the adolescents. The instrument taps social competence, externalizing and internalizing problems. In the adolescent SCBE, more than 65% of the items (54 items) remained practically the same as in the preschool version, 24 items…

The Cognitive Style Indicator (CoSI) includes 3 cognitive dimensions: creating (flexible, open-ended and inventive), knowing (emphasizing facts, details, objectivity, and rationality), and planning (guided by preferences for certainty and well-structured information). The first aim of this research was to validate the 3-factor structure of the…