Examined predictive validity of Medical Specialty Preference Scales (MSPS) and Medical Specialty Preference Inventory (MSPI). Administered MSPS to 71 medical students and MSPI to 73 medical students. Findings indicated that MSPI predicted accurately three times more than did MSPS. Based on predictive validity and teaching possibilities, MSPI seems…

Presents brief history of process research leading to development of process model, which guided development of four measures: therapist intentions, therapist response modes, client reactions, and client behaviors. For each measure, presents description and information about format for data collection, validity, reliability, and research findings.…

By administering an attitude survey to 3,328 parents of elementary school students, use of positive and negative Likert item stems was analyzed. Respondents who answered positive/negative item pairs that were parallel in meaning consistently were compared with those who answered inconsistently. Implications for construction of affective measures…

Criticizes the William Bennett/Emily Feistritzer "Report Card on American Education 1993" for misrepresenting the "crisis" condition of U.S. education. State rankings of SAT scores flatten data and exaggerate differences. Bennett also ignores influence of limited English proficiency, poverty, and percentage of test-takers on…

The Non-Equivalent-groups Anchor Test (NEAT) design has been in wide use since at least the early 1940s. It involves two populations of test takers, P and Q, and makes use of an anchor test to link them. Two linking methods used for NEAT designs are those (a) based on chain equating and (b) that use the anchor test to post-stratify the…

In this study, the research problem was: "Is the computer based physics instruction as effective as laboratory intensive physics instruction with regards to academic success on electric circuits 9th grade students?" For this research of experimental quality the design of pre-test and post-test are applied with an experiment and a control…

We use data on statewide end-of-course tests in North Carolina to examine the relationship between teacher credentials and student achievement at the high school level. The availability of test scores in multiple subjects for each student permits us to estimate a model with student fixed effects, which helps minimize any bias associated with the…

In this study, the research problem was: "Is the computer based physics instruction as effective as laboratory intensive physics instruction with regards to academic success on electric circuits 9th grade students?" For this research of experimental quality the design of pre-test and post-test are applied with an experiment and a control…

Alternatives to a solitary testing format can involve students working in teams to arrive at the correct answer. We compared two group assessment methods, cooperative and competitive, to a solitary testing approach. In most comparisons examining the undergraduate respondents' (N = 77) performance, the two group-testing methods were equivalent.…

This research aimed at developing a methodological framework to investigate the alignment of the Lebanese national math exam tests with the curriculum at the middle school level, during the transitory period of a major curricular reform. The focus is on exploring the characteristics of an "assessment culture" set by the national exams…

This study compared four methods for setting item response time thresholds to differentiate rapid-guessing behavior from solution behavior. Thresholds were either (a) common for all test items, (b) based on item surface features such as the amount of reading required, (c) based on visually inspecting response time frequency distributions, or (d)…

This study introduces three growth modeling techniques: latent growth modeling (LGM), hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), and longitudinal profile analysis via multidimensional scaling (LPAMS). It compares the multilevel growth parameter estimates and potential predictor effects obtained using LGM, HLM, and LPAMS. The purpose of this multilevel…

This study evaluated personality variables that underlie hypnotic susceptibility. It was correlational, did not require ongoing contact with participants, and included a validation study as an integral component. The subjects were 359 college students (250 in the original sample and 109 in the cross validation study) taking undergraduate courses…

Item bias has been a major concern for test developers during recent years. The Mantel-Haenszel statistic has been among the preferred methods for identifying biased items. The statistic's performance in identifying uniform bias in simulated data modeled by producing various levels of difference in the (item difficulty) b-parameter for reference…