Over the decades, those in education have waged a noble struggle in an attempt to achieve the respect and dignity worthy of their profession. Their social value, their worthiness, and the critical nature of their success, it can be argued, are every bit as significant as that of practicing medicine. Research consistently demonstrates the positive…

Research on C-testing has given us few accounts of the relationship between text characteristics and the nature of processing in the C-test completion. The present investigation set out to contribute to this line of research. The purpose of the study was two-fold: First, it attempted to explore the factors by which the difficulty of the C-test can…

Objective: Assuring research participants' capacity to provide informed consent has become increasingly important in health and mental health research, and each study faces unique capacity-assessment challenges, possibly requiring its own screening tool. This article describes the development and preliminary testing of a capacity-to-consent tool…

Within the field of psychological assessment, the Wechsler scales continue to be the most widely used intelligence batteries. The concepts, methods, and procedures inherent in the design of the Wechsler scales have been so influential that they have guided most of the test development and research in the field for more than a half century. This…

In this study, the authors examined the stability of Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory--2 (J. N. Butcher, W. G. Dahlstrom, J. R. Graham, A. Tellegen, & B. Kaemmer, 1989) code types in a sample of 94 injured workers with a mean test-retest interval of 21.3 months (SD = 14.1). Congruence rates for undefined code types were 34% for…

The third edition of the "Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination" (Goodglass, Kaplan, and Barresi) introduced standardized procedures for coding discourse samples elicited using the well known Cookie Theft illustration. To evaluate the reliability of this discourse coding procedure, a transcribed sample was coded by 14 novice examiners…

In this article, the author discusses the findings of the study entitled, "The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education's Failure to Teach America's History and Institutions," by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a Delaware think tank. In the study, a 60-question, multiple-choice test was administered to 14,000 freshmen and seniors at…

The development of technologies for monitoring the welfare of crewmembers is a critical requirement for extended spaceflight. Behavior analytic methodologies provide a framework for studying the performance of individuals and groups, and brief computerized tests have been used successfully to examine the impairing effects of sleep, drug, and…

The author, a Boston-based attorney and the co-director of the Center for Law and Education, presents testimony about students with disabilities, shares some thoughts generally about whether the requirements of NCLB are working for these particular students, and identifies areas of concern and areas in need of improvement. Specifically, she…

Ten-year-old students in an experimental group and a control group were tested for metacognitive abilities in reading comprehension before and after implementation of treatment in the experimental group. The teachers of the students in the experimental group were trained in metacognitive strategy instruction and in optimizing instruction time for…

Dynamic assessment (DA), as a pro-learning form of assessment, has been discussed in the educational literature for three decades or more. As a concept it has yet to be picked up in any significant way by the more established second language testing/assessment literature published in the English language. There is, however, every reason to believe…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to find out what kind of contextual factors that positively or negatively influence effective school improvement (ESI) in The Netherlands. Design/methodology/approach: To achieve the above-mentioned purpose, Sun's contextual level model with ten contextual factors and 48 indicators has been used to carefully…

Objective: To investigate the attitudes among mental health professionals regarding the use of genetic testing. Methods: Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals (N = 41) who were enrolled in a week-long course in psychiatric genomics completed questionnaires before and after the course designed to assess how diagnostic genetic tests…

This paper describes the development of the CAOS test, designed to measure students' conceptual understanding of important statistical ideas, across three years of revision and testing, content validation, and reliability analysis. Results are reported from a large scale class testing and item responses are compared from pretest to posttest in…

Although largely left out of the No Child Left Behind legislation, social studies remains a frequently tested subject on state-level standardized exams. As of 2004, 23 states conducted standards-based social studies tests, 10 of which could be considered high stakes. Where social studies will fit into the national testing picture is uncertain, but…