Testing programs are confronted with the decision of whether to report individual scores for examinees that have engaged in rapid guessing (RG). As noted by the "Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing," this decision should be based on a documented criterion that determines score exclusion. To this end, a number of heuristic…

Purpose: Children with a developmental language disorder (DLD) are often delayed in their grammatical development. This is suggested to be the most important characteristic and clinical marker of DLD. However, it is unknown if this assumption is valid for young children, in the earliest stages of grammatical development. For this reason, this…

This article critically evaluates the most important data set on teacher absence in sub-Saharan Africa, namely the World Bank's national education service delivery indicator school surveys which have been conducted in 10 countries during the last decade. The three main conclusions of this review are (1) the very high levels of teacher absenteeism…

"Viva voce" or oral examinations are an intrinsic part of the examination of many doctoral theses. There is some ambiguity about their purpose; however, they are generally perceived to be an opportunity for the candidate to respond to the examiners' comments and questions. They also allow examiners to assure themselves of the candidate's…

To become effective learners, students need to develop good evaluative judgment skills. Unfortunately, numerous studies find that self-evaluation estimates provided by undergraduates often differ significantly from the marks awarded by the tutor. This suggests that students either have a rather poor grasp of the assessment criteria, or they find…

Equating methods are designed to adjust between alternate versions of assessments targeting the same content at the same level, with the aim that scores from the different versions can be used interchangeably. The statistical processes used in equating have, however, been extended to statistically "link" assessments that differ, such as…

Matching the identity of unfamiliar faces is important in applied identity verification tasks, for example when verifying photo ID at border crossings, in secure access areas, or when issuing identity credentials. In these settings, other biographical details--such as name or date of birth on an identity document--are also often compared to…

Purpose: This study examines the efficacy of perceptual training for improving typical listeners' identification of vowels produced by individuals with dysarthria. We examined whether training on a subset of vowels can generalize to (a) untrained vowels and (b) other speakers with similar overall intelligibility. Method: Sixty naive listeners…

Within a broad turn toward identity-focused pedagogies, educators are increasingly recognizing the critical impetus to engage with gender in expansive and inclusive ways. However, challenges persist. Often inadequate supports are exacerbated by a lack of empirical investigations into whether and how gender-just language teaching may contribute to…

Standard methods for the meta-analysis of medical tests, without assuming a gold standard, are limited to dichotomous data. Multivariate probit models are used to analyse correlated dichotomous data, and can be extended to model ordinal data. Within the context of an imperfect gold standard, they have previously been used for the analysis of…

Writing is generally assessed internationally using rubric-based approaches, but there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that the reliability of such approaches is poor. In contrast, comparative judgement studies suggest that it is possible to assess open ended tasks such as writing with greater reliability. Many previous studies, however,…

Misinformation and Disinformation, both types of Information Disorder in the cyber world, operate on a systemic level. Several factors enabling their persistence, including laws, policies, and technological mediators, have been investigated in the literature. Cybersecurity frameworks and guidelines specify that the target victims, as part of the…

Digital resources offer a vast assortment of educational opportunities for students in higher education. From 2018 to 2022, a digital study assistant (DSA), named SIDDATA, was developed at three German universities and consequently field-tested. One of the DSA's features is an AI-driven natural language interface for educational resource…

"Shifting Sands: Flimsy Food Findings" examines how irreproducible science affects select areas of government policy and regulation governed by different federal agencies. This second report focuses on "Food Frequency Questionnaire" and irreproducible research in the field of nutritional epidemiology, which informs the U.S.…

Research Context: In educational research, "context effects" are often of inferential interest to researchers as well as of evaluative interest to policymakers. While student education outcomes likely depend on individual-level influences like individual academic achievement, school contexts may also make a difference. Such questions are…