Because of the lack of error-free, on-task performance by young children, cognitive modeling has not generally been considered an appropriate technique for characterizing computer use by young children. It is argued that cognitive modeling can be a useful strategy for organizing data on children's performance when the domain being studied is…

This study is the first stage of a wider enquiry into alternative ways of assessing the readability of specialist texts. The interest in assessing these texts arose from the need to grade 60 medical journal articles for an individualized English-as-a-Foreign-Language reading scheme for doctors. The study reports on an investigation of subjective…

Multiple group factor analysis is described and illustrated through a simulation involving 5,000 examinees. The estimation process of the group factors were implemented using the TESTFACT program of Wilson and others (1987). Group factor analysis is described as a special case of confirmatory factor analysis. Group factors can be computed based on…

American education has long equated reading with the narrower notion of literacy. Such an approach bypasses the concept of "difficulty," or the placing of ideas into question. The educational system has resisted adoption of a broader view of reading, because: (1) anything difficult is viewed as elitist and undemocratic; and (2) the…

Increasingly over the past several years, the reading of literature has been viewed as a social interpretive process. Conceptions of reading have changed from a largely cognitive process of print decoding to a socially situated one of understanding and appropriating a variety of discourse and text conventions. "Difficulty" is the result…

Researchers have suggested two models of risk preference to account for subjects' preference for tasks of moderate difficulty. The affective model proposes that pride of success and shame of failure are responsible for the observed preference. The cognitive model suggests preference for tasks of moderate difficulty because they are the most…

A study was made to determine whether there exists a group of overpersisting children who are considered mastery-oriented because of their persistence but who actually demonstrate characteristics of learned helplessness. Subjects were 71 females and 84 males from fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade classrooms. Children's scores on the Intellectual…

At a workshop exploring practical methods that elementary and secondary teachers may use to analyze texts, three parallel texts were subjected to three forms of analysis: subjective analysis, examination of cohesive ties, and linguistic analysis of selected text variables such as word and sentence length. The subjective ranking of the passages'…

A study determined whether chemical operations specialists at skill level 1 differ in terms of aptitude, job knowledge, job confidence, and perceptions of task difficulty, task importance, task frequency, and task training, depending on whether the specialists are active U.S. Army soldiers or are in the Army Reserve. The subjects for whom complete…

When readability formulas are used to review workbooks and textbooks their value is limited because application techniques have failed to take into consideration the exercises and examples in these books. The O'Hear and Ramsey (OR) Corrective technique has been developed to alleviate this problem. It allows readability data to be used accurately…

A survey of computer scientists was conducted to identify factors that affect software complexity. A total of 160 items were selected from the literature to include in a questionnaire sent to 425 individuals who were employees of computer-related businesses in Lawrence and Kansas City. The items were grouped into nine categories called system…

A new approach to polychotomous scoring of test items, similar to "max-alpha" scaling (MAS) and known as polyweighting, has been developed. Unlike MAS, this new method of polychotomous scoring provides scoring weights for a given item that are independent of the difficulty of other items in the analysis. Moreover, the scoring weights are…

The purpose of this study was twofold: to investigate to what extent characteristics of anchor tests may affect precision of item calibration, and to estimate to what extent precision of item calibration may be affected by removal of persons whose response patterns deviate from those normally expected from the Rasch one-parameter logistic model.…

Research on sex differences in children's achievement orientations has suggested that girls have less confidence in their ability than boys, especially among bright children. To examine how sex differences in achievement orientation vary across achievement levels, 250 fifth grade children completed a questionnaire which assessed their preference…