Universities administer assessments for accountability and program improvement. Student effort is low during assessments due to minimal perceived consequences. The effects of low effort are compounded by assessment context. This project investigates validity concerns caused by minimal effort and exacerbated by contextual factors. Systematic…

Many workforce development training programmes use learning gains as a measure of programme effectiveness. However, research on K-12 education suggests that posttest scores may be influenced by pretesting effects. Pretesting may improve posttest performance by giving learners preknowledge of posttest content. Alternatively, pretesting may enhance…

Researchers strategically assess youth mental health by soliciting reports from multiple informants. Typically, these informants (e.g., parents, teachers, youth themselves) vary in the social contexts where they observe youth. Decades of research reveal that the most common data conditions produced with this approach consist of discrepancies…

Attention to evaluation quality is commonplace, even if sometimes implicit. Drawing on her 2010 Presidential Address to the American Evaluation Association, Leslie Cooksy suggests that evaluation quality depends, at least in part, on the intersection of three factors: (a) evaluator competency, (b) aspects of the evaluation environment or context,…

Across the world, university teachers are increasingly being required to engage with diversity in the classes they teach. Using the data from a large Economics 1 class at a South African university, this attempts to understand the effects of diversity on chances of success and how assessment can impact on this. By demonstrating how theory can be…

The relationship between children's activity level and adjustment has been based on a one-dimensional conceptualization of activity level and warrants re-examination. Current questionnaires conflate amount of physical movement with its appropriateness to the context, making it impossible to tell which aspect of activity level accounts for its…

This study empirically evaluates the Riggs and O'Leary (1989) model of dating violence. A sample of 200 college students completes assessments concerning the occurrence of violence in their dating relationships. The incidence of self-reported partner violence is 25% for women and 10% for men. Multivariate logistic regression analyses are performed…

Quality of life (QOL) of adolescents has been scarcely documented in a general population sample. The study was aimed at translating and adapting the Adolescent Duke Health Profile to Vietnamese, validating the questionnaire, determining reference value, and identifying determinants of poor QOL. Following a cross-cultural methodology, the…

Standardized rating scales are the most often used part of the multidimensional assessment of children's behavior. However, low cross-informant correlations raise concerns about the reliability and validity of the resulting scores. This study examined whether the manner in which behavioral constructs are measured differs across informants, across…