This study examined the social functioning of bistrategic youths (i.e., those who employ both aggressive and prosocial behavior) in order to further understand their social competence in peer social networks. Within our sample of 318 fifth-grade participants recruited from an urban school district in the northeastern US, bistrategic preadolescents…

This paper explores alternative assessment methods from the perspective of categorizations. It addresses the technologies that support assessment. It discusses initial, formative, and summative assessment, as well as objective and subjective assessment, and formal and informal assessment. It approaches each category of assessment from the…

With support from The Wallace Foundation, the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) has been coordinating a number of learning experiences for cities aimed at increasing opportunities to share best practices and providing access to best practices and national trends. Initially, 57 cities convened in Baltimore, Maryland in February 2013 for the…

This Spotlight focuses on data from the 2013 Core Data Service (CDS) to better understand how higher education institutions approach student information systems (SISs). Information provided for this spotlight was derived from Module 8 of the CDS survey, which asked several questions regarding information systems and applications. Responses from…

Many states collect data on students and teachers, but linking teachers to students by course--the teacher-student data link (TSDL)--at the state level is critical to understanding the connection between student academic growth and teacher training, qualifications, and practice. This roadmap discusses the six key areas DQC recommends focusing on…

The objectives of the present study were to conceptualize interpersonal coping flexibility and to explore how it influences personal adaptation. Two hundred sixty two university students were classified based on their responses to prompts about their degree of prioritizing harmony and the number of coping strategies they employed when dealing with…

This research examines issues regarding model estimation and robustness in the use of Bayesian Inference Networks (BINs) for measuring Learning Progressions (LPs). It provides background information on LPs and how they might be used in practice. Two simulation studies are performed, along with real data examples. The first study examines the case…

Test scores are commonly reported in a small number of ordered categories. Examples of such reporting include state accountability testing, Advanced Placement tests, and English proficiency tests. This paper introduces and evaluates methods for estimating achievement gaps on a familiar standard-deviation-unit metric using data from these ordered…

To examine key parameters of the initial conditions in early category learning, two studies compared 5-month-olds' object categorization between tasks involving previously unseen novel objects, and between measures within tasks. Infants in Experiment 1 participated in a visual familiarization-novelty preference (VFNP) task with two-dimensional…

The concept of attention is central to theorizing in learning as well as in working memory. However, research to date has yet to establish how attention as construed in one domain maps onto the other. We investigate two manifestations of attention in category- and cue-learning to examine whether they might provide common ground between learning…

Same-different categorization is a fundamental feat of human cognition. Although birds and nonhuman primates readily learn same-different discriminations and successfully transfer them to novel stimuli, no such demonstration exists for rats. Using a spatial discrimination learning task, we show that rats can both learn to discriminate arrays of…

Using a complex simulation study we investigated parameter recovery, classification accuracy, and performance of two item-fit statistics for correct and misspecified diagnostic classification models within a log-linear modeling framework. The basic manipulated test design factors included the number of respondents (1,000 vs. 10,000), attributes (3…

Flexagons, introduced to a wide audience 50 years ago by Martin Gardner, now have an extensive literature and are an active field of research. This paper describes two kinds: edge flexagons and point flexagons, and gives an example of one means of classification.

We investigated changes in bias (preference for one response alternative) in signal detection when relative reinforcer frequency for correct responses varied across sessions. In Experiment 1, 4 rats responded in a two-stimulus, two-response identification procedure employing temporal stimuli (short vs. long houselight presentations). Relative…

In this article we report on listener categorization of meaningful environmental sounds. A starting point for this study was the phenomenological taxonomy proposed by Gaver (1993b). In the first experimental study, 15 participants classified 60 environmental sounds and indicated the properties shared by the sounds in each class. In a second…