Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

A common challenge in the evaluation of K-12 science education is identifying valid scales that are an appropriate fit for both a student's age and the educational outcomes of interest. Though many new scales have been validated in recent years, there is much to learn about the appropriate educational contexts and audiences for these measures.…

Background: In order to measure the proficiency of person populations in various domains, large-scale assessments often use marginal maximum likelihood IRT models where person proficiency is modelled as a random variable. Thus, the model does not provide proficiency estimates for any single person. A popular approach to derive these proficiency…

Objectives: This study sought to make the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire (BIPQ) to be more informative about illness representation among older adults with hypertension. The authors developed categories for coding the open-ended question regarding cause of illness in the BIPQ--a pervasive quantitative measure for illness representation.…

The purpose of this study was to determine if a pre-hire structured interview with competency-based behavioral questions can be linked to the teaching performance ratings of faculty at member institutions of the Florida State University System (SUS). Insights gained from this investigation can support the initiative for a proactive Human Resource…

The study examined gender dimension in the development of effective teaching skills among distance education (DE) students. The conceptual framework for the study is gender mainstreaming which centres on pluralistic approach to diversity issues among both men and women. A longitudinal developmental research design was used for the study. A sample…

Evidence is accumulating that early intervention can be effective in improving the skills of young children with autism spectrum disorder. However, the science is hampered by the lack of agreed "gold standard" tools for the measurement of progress and outcome. What is required is a reliable, valid, and sensitive measure of change in the…

This cross-sectional study explored students' conceptions of science learning via drawing analysis. A total of 906 Taiwanese students in 4th, 6th, 8th, 10th, and 12th grade were asked to use drawing to illustrate how they conceptualise science learning. Students' drawings were analysed using a coding checklist to determine the presence or absence…

This is a longitudinal study of development in coordinated mother-infant vocal interaction from 4 to 10 months (N = 41) focusing on the development of turn-taking patterns and time spent in coordinated vocal interaction. Data analyses were carried out using multistate analysis. Both mothers and infants were found to coordinate their own…

In all human cultures, people gesture iconically. However, the evolutionary basis of iconic gestures is unknown. In this study, chimpanzees and bonobos, and 2- and 3-year-old children, learned how to operate two apparatuses to get rewards. Then, at test, only a human adult had access to the apparatuses, and participants could instruct her about…

As part of an ongoing project to examine student learning in upper-division courses in thermal and statistical physics, we have examined student reasoning about entropy and the second law of thermodynamics. We have examined reasoning in terms of heat transfer, entropy maximization, and statistical treatments of multiplicity and probability. In…

Supporting students to build robust fraction schemes and operations is an enduring challenge in mathematics education. Recent research has explored a developmental trajectory of fractions schemes and operations constructed by upper-elementary and middle school students in an effort to support student learning. This study broadened the existing…

Concept inventory tests are one method to evaluate conceptual understanding and identify possible misconceptions. The multiple-choice question format, offering a choice between a correct selection and common misconceptions, can provide an assessment of students' conceptual understanding in various dimensions. Misconceptions of some engineering…

This article reports on a study on the effect of orthography on L1-based phonological transfer in L2 production in 40 novice English-speaking learners of Spanish. In particular, the role of auditory-orthographic training and production and the influence of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are examined. Data elicited via a picture-naming task…

A growing body of research indicates that self-control is critical to academic success. Surprisingly little is known, however, about the diverse strategies students use to implement self-control or how well these strategies work. To address these issues, the author conducted a naturalistic investigation of self-control strategies (Study 1) and 2…