Many colleges have either begun or are contemplating using the web-based survey to gather student feedback on faculty teaching. Unlike the paper-based method, the web-based approach gives every student in the class the opportunity to provide feedback. Hence, the populations that participate in the web-based and paper-based methods may be quite…

The context for this investigation was an undergraduate literacy methods course taught by Cindy, the first author of this manuscript. A central course goal was to prepare pre-service teachers to provide effective literacy instruction for children from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The focus of this study was an examination of the…

The criminal arrest histories of 262 medium-security male inmates were correlated with the Proactive (P) and Reactive (R) composite scales of the Psychological Inventory of Criminal Thinking Styles (PICTS). As predicted, only scores on the P scale correlated significantly with prior arrests for proactive aggression (robbery, burglary) and only…

Suggesting many ways (not just one way) to understand what children are doing with language and literacy, this book presents essays that address the need for alternative perspectives as well as anthropological, socio-psycholinguistic, and reader response perspectives in assessing children's language and literacy. After "Introducation: What Is an…

A training program is presented for helping teenagers and young adults deal creatively with interpersonal conflict and violence. It explores the dynamics of anger, hurt, conflict, communication, cooperation, and assertiveness as it teaches listening, mediation, and conflict-defusing skills. The manual consists of 10 sections, 8 of which form the…

This paper suggests that one way teachers can revitalize literature studies in classrooms and foster students' response to literature is by teaching the literature of the Vietnam War. The paper presents some typical student responses to some Vietnam War literature, which stand in striking contrast to student responses to other kinds of literature.…

Project VIP (Violence Is Preventable) is a comprehensive research-based program designed to help children and young adults make smart choices about violence. It emphasizes the use of student-centered approaches to help develop strategies for conflict resolution and for avoiding violence. The student book is a workbook with a number of activities;…

The relative difficulty of the seven test-wiseness skills measured by the Gibb Experimental Test of Testwiseness, a measure of cue-using skills, was studied. Participants were 243 undergraduates from 3 universities, 79% of whom were Caucasian. Participants reported a mean grade point average of 3.0 on a 4-point scale. Results suggest that some of…

To investigate whether and how commercial software products for literature do or could complement response-based pedagogy, an extensive review of existing applications was undertaken. Teams of language arts teachers, both preservice and inservice, met weekly to initially discuss and share observations regarding the potential of multimedia to…

An increasingly popular test format allows examinees to choose the items they will answer from among a larger set. When examinee choice is allowed fairness requires that the different test forms thus formed be equated for their possible differential difficulty. For this equating to be possible it is necessary to know how well examinees would have…

Reading is invisible. Any report of another's reading (beyond the level of word recognition) must rely on some kind of reproduction of the actual experience; there is no way to tap into the experience itself. After completing a pilot study, a small number of adolescents--5 eighth graders and 5 eleventh graders read the first four chapters of…

This article reports that curriculum experts see some slow but significant shifts in thinking regarding the role of literature in the K-12 curriculum. The article first discusses changes in elementary classrooms, such as the use of "real" literature in the form of trade books. Also considered is the call for new basal readers or content…

Arguing that censorship is not simply an attempt to control what is taught in the schools but also an infringement on the legal learning rights of students, this collection of essays offers insights into how censorship can come about, its impacts and repercussions, and the ways it might be fought. The collection stresses action rather than…

Applications of item response theory to practical testing problems including equating, differential item functioning, and computerized adaptive testing, require that item parameter estimates be placed onto a common metric. In this study, three methods for developing a common metric under item response theory are compared: (1) linking separate…

A 1992 study by R. Gershon found discrepancies when comparing the theoretical Rasch item characteristic curve with the average empirical curve for 1,304 vocabulary items administered to 7,711 students. When person-item mismatches were deleted (for any person-item interaction where the ability of the person was much higher or much lower than the…