Educational leaders have a comprehensive responsibility for how preschools and schools work with children in need of special educational support. The aim of this research is to study how educational leaders (a) explain why children have problems in schools, (b) consider how preschools/schools should help children in need of special support and (c)…

Because of national, state, and local accountability to prepare students to be college and career-ready, secondary schools are looking for ways to maximize student academic growth while in high school. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relation between academic growth as measured by the changes in performance from students' 8th…

"I think what I learned in the IB [International Baccalaureate] program...well, in a way I felt like--have you read Great Expectations? When Pip gets the stipend from the mysterious person and he's walking out and the clouds are lifting up and he can see all the possibilities--that's how I felt with the IB program." -Student reflection…

Given the increasing problem of fraud, crime, and national security threats, assessing credibility is a recurring research topic in Information Systems and in other disciplines. Decision support systems can help. But the success of the system depends on reliable cues that can distinguish deceptive/truthful behavior and on a proven classification…

In 2003, the "Harvard Educational Review" published a controversial article by Roy Freedle that claimed bias against African American students in the SAT college admissions test. Freedle's work stimulated national media attention and faced an onslaught of criticism from experts at the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the agency…

What do learners do when they control whether to engage in massed or spaced practice? According to theories by Son (2004) and by Metcalfe and Kornell (2005), the tendency for learners to choose spaced practice over massed practice should decline as item difficulty becomes greater. Support originally was obtained when pairs containing unfamiliar…

The Tower of London (TOL) is a widely used instrument for assessing planning ability. Inhibition and (spatial) working memory are assumed to contribute to performance on the TOL, but findings about the relationship between these cognitive processes are often inconsistent. Moreover, the influence of specific properties of TOL problems on cognitive…

This study investigated interactions between the isolated-interactive elements effect and levels of learner expertise with first year undergraduate university accounting students. The isolated-interactive elements effect occurs when learning is facilitated by initially presenting elements of information sequentially in an isolated form rather than…

The present study investigated the extent to which the impact of motor difficulty on the acquisition of a computer task varies as a function of age. Fourteen young and 14 older participants performed 352 sequences of 10 serial pointing movements with a wireless pen on a digitiser tablet. A conditional probabilistic structure governed the…

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence (SSREI) scale in a sample of international students studying in the U.S. universities using Rasch analysis. The results indicated that the original five-category rating structure may not function effectively for the international student sample. The…

A traditional debate format, in which a small group of students is given the task of presenting arguments for or against a particular issue, can promote pro and con dualism that is both incomplete and counter to developing a sociological imagination. In this article, the authors describe their efforts to avoid this kind of dualism through the…

The acknowledged high relationship between working memory and intelligence suggests common underlying cognitive mechanisms and, perhaps, shared biological substrates. If this is the case, improvement in working memory by repeated exposure to challenging span tasks might be reflected in increased intelligence scores. Here we report a study in which…

A latent transition analysis (LTA) model was described with a mixture Rasch model (MRM) as the measurement model. Unlike the LTA, which was developed with a latent class measurement model, the LTA-MRM permits within-class variability on the latent variable, making it more useful for measuring treatment effects within latent classes. A simulation…

Cognitive complexity level is important for measuring both aptitude and achievement in large-scale testing. Tests for standards-based assessment of mathematics, for example, often include cognitive complexity level in the test blueprint. However, little research exists on how mathematics items can be designed to vary in cognitive complexity level.…

The purpose of this intrinsic case study was to learn about the perceptions of singing and participation in choir of the author's eighth grade choir students. Specific areas of focus included insight on why the eighth grade boys sing and enjoy singing, perceptions of singing in a daily choir class, and perceptions of singing in an auditioned…