Throughout the 1990s, one state after another adopted prescriptive education standards enforced by frequent standardized testing, often of the high-stakes variety. A top-down, get-tough movement to impose "accountability" began to squeeze the life out of classrooms. Recently, politicians, corporate CEOs, and testing companies are trying to sell…

In this study participants were asked to describe pictured events in one type-written sentence, containing one of two different syntactic structures (subordinated vs. coordinated subject noun phrases). According to the hypothesis, the larger subordinated structure (one noun phrase including a second, subordinated, one) should be cognitively more…

In this study, the authors extend the standard item response model with internal restrictions on item difficulty (MIRID) to fit polytomous items using cumulative logits and adjacent-category logits. Moreover, the new model incorporates discrimination parameters and is rooted in a multilevel framework. It is a nonlinear mixed model so that existing…

Multiple cue probability learning studies have typically focused on stationary environments. We present 3 experiments investigating learning in changing environments. A fine-grained analysis of the learning dynamics shows that participants were responsive to both abrupt and gradual changes in cue-outcome relations. We found no evidence that…

In this reply to the comment of McVay and Kane (2010), I consider their argument concerning how Watkins's (2008) elaborated control theory informs their perspective on the role of executive control in mind wandering. I argue that although in a number of places the elaborated control theory is consistent with the perspective of McVay and Kane that…

Several judgment and decision-making tasks are assumed to involve memory functions, but significant knowledge gaps on the memory processes underlying these tasks remain. In a study on 568 adults between 25 and 80 years of age, hypotheses were tested on the specific relationships between individual differences in working memory, episodic memory,…

The Missionary Training Center (MTC), affiliated with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, needs a reliable and cost effective way to measure the oral language proficiency of missionaries learning Spanish. The MTC needed to measure incoming missionaries' Spanish language proficiency for training and classroom assignment as well as to…

Using data collected through classroom videotaping, student surveys, and the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), the present study explored associations between teacher-provided intellectual challenge, two types of support (instrumental and emotional), and students' momentary academic engagement in high school science classrooms. Results of 3-level…

The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) High School Transcript Study (HSTS) found that high school graduates in 2005 earned more mathematics credits, took higher level mathematics courses, and obtained higher grades in mathematics courses than in 1990. The report also noted that these improvements in students' academic records…

The Savannah Early College Program (SECP) opened its doors in August 2007 to make a difference in the lives of all students who enrolled. Its primary mission was to combine academic rigor and support to help students enter college early and graduate from high school with up to 2 years of college credit. Since SECP joined the Early College High…

Following the trend in science and engineering education generated by the visible impact created by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), the investigator developed a Physics of Semiconductors Concept Inventory (PSCI). PSCI fills the need of standardized concept tests for undergraduate education in photonics and electrical engineering. The structure…

Based on qualitative data obtained from 15 South Asian (SA) B.Ed. (EL) (Bachelor of Education in English Language) students, this study reports on SA students' difficulty in mastering Mandarin-based written Chinese and the vernacular Cantonese in Hong Kong. For convenience, SA here also refers to students whose homeland is the Philippines. Since…

This study looked at 4th grade classrooms to see "how" teachers implement NCTM standards-based or reform-based mathematics instruction and then analyzed it for the capacity to improve students' "algebra readiness." The qualitative study was based on classroom observations, teacher and administrator interviews, and teacher surveys. The study took…

Cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) is a new theoretical framework for psychological and educational testing that is designed to provide detailed information about examinees' strengths and weaknesses in specific knowledge structures and processing skills. During the last three decades, more than a dozen psychometric models have been developed…

Small sample equating remains a largely unexplored area of research. This study attempts to fill in some of the research gaps via a large-scale, IRT-based simulation study that evaluates the performance of seven small-sample equating methods under various test characteristic and sampling conditions. The equating methods considered are typically…