Examines data on prize-winning books during the 1990s from the American Historical Association, American Musicological Society, the College Art Association, and the Modern Language Association. Suggests that studying awards from the leading humanities scholarly associations can tell much about the disciplines, publishing industry, and library…

Used the Activity Apperception Story Procedure to elicit perceptions of play, work, and learning from 3- to 6-year-olds. Found that children could distinguish play/work and learning/not learning using photographs. While children attended to anticipated cues for justifying their classification of photos, the justification data suggested that the…

Points out that today's taxonomy is very different than what many biology teachers learned when they were in school. Traces the history of some of the changes and describes the current taxonomy. (DDR)

Describes how an electronic greeting card Web site, Egreetings, redesigned the site to improve the number of greetings sent by users. Goals included reorganizing the card collection, including taxonomy and controlled vocabulary; improving navigation and searching; placing ads and promotions; developing a music greeting collection; and improving…

Attempts to place the issues associated with computer-automated scoring within the context of current validity theory and presents a taxonomy of automated scoring procedures as a framework for discussing threats to validity that may take on increased importance for specific approaches to automated scoring. (SLD)

Used empirical data from a certification test to study methods from statistical process control that have been proposed to classify an item score pattern as fitting or misfitting the underlying item response theory model in computerized adaptive testing. Results for 1,392 examinees show that different types of misfit can be distinguished. (SLD)

Validated a taxonomy of 31 multiple-choice item-writing guidelines through a logical process that included reviewing 27 textbooks on educational testing and the results of 27 studies and reviews published since 1990. Presents the taxonomy, which is intended for classroom assessment. (SLD)

Traces the history of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and the need to differentiate two-year colleges. Includes brief examination of classification theory and practice, followed by discussion of the particular challenges in classifying two-year colleges. Suggests new systems of classification would bring benefits.…

Two experiments examined six-month-olds' ability to form an abstract containment category. Results indicated that, after habituation to object pairs in a containment relation, infants looked reliably longer at an example of an unfamiliar versus familiar containment relation, indicating that they could form a categorical representation of…

Examines the perceptual cues used by three- and four-month-old infants to categorically distinguish perceptually similar animal species. Indicates that cues form the facial and head region provide the critical source of information that allows young infants to categorically differentiate cats and dogs and presumably a number of other animal…

Assesses the effect of delay between an event and new postevent information related to it in six-month-old infants' memory. Three phenomena were studied: memory impairment, memory facilitation, and categorization. Suggests that postevent information has different qualitative effects depending on its timing, and provides a basis for understanding…

Discusses access methods in hypermedia and information retrieval and describes a research project in which similarity measures have been extended to include imprecise matching over different dimensions of structured classification schemes. The semantic similarity of information units forms the basis for the automatic construction of links and is…

Infants were familiarized with plastic animals from one of two categories (land or sea) that were judged similar or variable by adults. Infants were then tested with novel animals from the same or a different category. Thirteen-month-olds in the similar familiarization condition dishabituated to novel animals of a different category and, to a…

The uses and abuses of cut scores are examined. The article demonstrates (1) that cut scores always entail judgment; (2) that cut scores inherently result in misclassification; (3) that cut scores impose an artificial dichotomy on an essentially continuous distribution of knowledge, skill, or ability; and (4) that no true cut scores exist. (SLD)

Proposes a mixture item response model for investigating individual differences in the selection of response categories in multiple choice items. A real data example illustrates how the model can be used to distinguish examinees disproportionately attracted to different types of distractors, and a simulation study evaluates item parameter recovery…