Life sciences became Biology, a formal scientific discipline, at the turn of the nineteenth century, when it adopted the methods of reductive physics and chemistry. Mendel's hypothesis of inheritance of discrete factors further introduced a quantitative reductionist dimension into biology. In 1910 Johannsen differentiated between the…

It is a well-known problem in testing the fit of models to multinomial data that the full underlying contingency table will inevitably be sparse for tests of reasonable length and for realistic sample sizes. Under such conditions, full-information test statistics such as Pearson's X[superscript 2] and the likelihood ratio statistic G[superscript…

The first college mathematics course a student enrolls in is often affected by performance on a college mathematics placement test. Yet validity evidence of mathematics placement tests remains limited, even for nationally standardized placement tests, and when it is available usually consists of examining a student's subsequent performance in…

This study looks at the real and perceived effects of inter-candidate variation in linguistic ability during pair-tested oral examinations in a southern Italian context. Pair testing has not been taken up in schools and universities in southern Italy despite its wide use in international testing systems. Colleagues and prospective candidates often…

The Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale is a well-known self-report instrument that is used to measure depressive symptomatology. Respondents who take the full-length version of the CES-D are administered a total of 20 items. This article investigates the use of curtailment and stochastic curtailment (SC), two sequential…

Validity evidence based on test content is important for educational tests to demonstrate the degree to which they fulfill their purposes. Most content validity studies involve subject matter experts (SMEs) who rate items that comprise a test form. In computerized-adaptive testing, examinees take different sets of items and test "forms"…

The first large-scale, nationwide academic achievement testing program using Stanford Achievement Test (Stanford) for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in the United States started in 1969. Over the past three decades, the Stanford has served as a benchmark in the field of deaf education for assessing student academic achievement. However, the…

This study sought to determine how students would describe their group-only cooperative testing experiences in terms of key elements of cooperative learning often cited in the literature. Written comments of 159 graduate students were analyzed and 26 related categories of comments were derived from 495 statements of students enrolled in two…

Since it was introduced in Forster and Davis (1984), masked priming has been widely adopted in the psycholinguistic research on visual word recognition, but there has been little consensus on its actual mechanisms, i.e. how it occurs and how it should be interpreted. This dissertation addresses two different interpretations of masked priming, one…

This research extends creativity theory by re-conceptualizing creativity as a two-dimensional construct (radical and incremental) and examining the differential effects of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic rewards, and supportive supervision on perceptions of creativity. We hypothesize and find two distinct types of creativity that are associated…

Taking an intervening test between learning episodes can enhance later source recollection. Paradoxically, testing can also increase people's susceptibility to the misinformation effect--a finding termed retrieval-enhanced suggestibility (RES, Chan, Thomas, & Bulevich, 2009). We conducted three experiments to examine this apparent contradiction.…

The field of educational testing has become increasingly important for providing different stakeholders and decision-makers with information. This paper discusses basic standards for methodological approaches used in measuring literacy skills among adults. The authors address the increasing interest in skills measurement, the discourses on how…

Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is an active current research field in psychometrics and educational measurement. However, there is very little software available to handle such adaptive tasks. The R package "catR" was developed to perform adaptive testing with as much flexibility as possible, in an attempt to provide a developmental and…

The utility of Orlando and Thissen's ("2000", "2003") S-X[squared] fit index was extended to the model-fit analysis of the graded response model (GRM). The performance of a modified S-X[squared] in assessing item-fit of the GRM was investigated in light of empirical Type I error rates and power with a simulation study having…

The purpose of this study was to examine the difference in student success by retained students who participate in the Hamblen County (Tennessee) Credit Recovery Program [HCCRP] in the year prior and following their participation. HCCRP is an alternative intervention for students who have been retained in the middle grades of Hamblen County School…