The purpose of this study was to create a valid and reliable volleyball common content knowledge (VB-CCK) test in secondary physical education contexts in the United States. Two physical education teacher educators served as content experts and developed test items for the VB-CCK test. We then established content validity with a group of…

Adolescents face complex texts rich in academic language. Existing research has documented how teachers can design curriculum to scaffold students' comprehension of complex texts, but little work has documented the moments of adolescents' encounters with complex texts, and how teachers can scaffold these encounters on a moment-to-moment basis to…

The transition of our large ([approximately]300 student) introductory soil science course to the online setting created several challenges, including engaging first- and second-year students, providing meaningful hands-on learning activities, and setting up online exams. The objective of this paper is to describe the development and use of…

Students often show difficulties in understanding rational numbers. Often, these are related to the natural number bias, that is, the tendency to apply the properties of natural numbers to rational number tasks. Although this phenomenon has received a lot of research interest over the last two decades, research on the existence of qualitatively…

Educators' support when using informational text in kindergarten is foundational to children's comprehension and future learning. Prior research has not offered clear insight into their help when children experience difficulties during informational text comprehension instruction. The current study examined one kindergarten educator's support.…

To ensure that student academic growth in a subject area is accurately captured, it is imperative that the underlying scale remains stable over time. As item parameter stability constitutes one of the factors that affects scale stability, NWEA® periodically conducts studies to check for the stability of the item parameter estimates for MAP®…

The Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy partnered with The Boston Foundation to examine and document the school-level practices that have enabled high growth and high academic achievement at the Pioneer Charter School of Science II, the winner of the 2021 Pozen Prize for Innovative Schools. The Rennie Center began with a review of…

There is an increased demand on nursing faculty to provide quality teaching and assessment. Nursing faculty are required to ensure accurate assessment of learning through testing and outcome measurement that are critical elements of the evaluation process. Likewise, nursing faculty should implement a logical evaluation system. However, the…

An equal-armed balance at equilibrium--the bar is horizontal--tips into disequilibrium upon displacing a weight. Equilibrium is restored by reversing that move--putting the weight back where it was, or doing the same on the other side. Piaget adopted the idea of equilibration to describe how the intellect, in relating to the world, develops.…

Educational research surrounding teaching methods and accepted practices is continually needed to improve teaching and teacher preparation programs. The revised Bloom's Taxonomy is often used by teachers in question development. The effectiveness of these questions are often dependent, not on the question alone, but also in how the question is…

People frequently gesture when problem-solving, particularly on tasks that require spatial transformation. Gesture often facilitates task performance by interacting with internal mental representations, but how this process works is not well understood. We investigated this question by exploring the case of mental abacus (MA), a technique in which…

Practice tests provide large mnemonic benefits over restudying, but learners judge practice tests as less effective than restudying. Consequently, learners infrequently utilize testing when controlling their study and often choose to be tested only on well-learned items. In 5 experiments, we examined whether learners' choices about testing and…

How can we improve the instructional effectiveness of an online slideshow lesson? In the present study, college students received a 12-slide multimedia slideshow lesson on how a geographic information system works. In a 2 × 2 design, the lesson was presented one complete slide at a time (large segment) or added one section of the slide at a time…

Word problems embed a math equation within a short narrative. Due to their structure, both numerical and linguistic factors can contribute to problem difficulty. The present studies explored the role of irrelevant information in word problems, to determine whether its negative impact is due to numerical (foregrounding hypothesis) or linguistic…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to find appropriate forms of analysis of multiple-choice questions (MCQ) to obtain an assessment method, as fair as possible, for the students. The authors intend to ascertain if it is possible to control the quality of the MCQ contained in a bank of questions, implemented in Moodle, presenting some evidence…