To ensure fairness, it is of critical importance that testing programs make sure that essay items given to examinees are equivalent in difficulty. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the stability and accuracy of a logistic regression based polytomous essay difficulty index. Preliminary results from a simulation study (9 conditions with a…

This report describes 4 years of research by the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) on developing indicators of classroom practice that have the potential to be used in large-scale settings and that draw attention to important aspects of standards-based learning and instruction. CRESSTs method was…

This paper and its "Executive Summary," separately published, are intended primarily for Chief State School Officers and their immediate staff members involved in statewide accountability policy development and implementation. The paper addresses certain key issues and contains a full exploration of the related technical aspects of…

A series of studies was conducted to develop and validate a scale to study racism in its newly adapted, ambivalent form. The scale was designed to measure the separate positively correlated hostile and benevolent components of racism. The first two studies, which involved 39 and 73 college students, established the questions that could be used for…

A procedure was developed to analyze data with missing observations by extracting data from a sparsely filled data matrix into analyzable smaller subsets of data. This subdividing method, based on the conceptual framework of meta-analysis, was accomplished by creating data sets that exhibit structural designs and then pooling variance components…

This study evaluated the comparative stability and agreement of three approaches to calculating school effects given both student-level and school-level data. The approaches were hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), ordinary least squares (OLS), and weighted least squares (WLS). Analyses were conducted using data from the 1998 Maryland School…

The importance of reassessing the psychometric properties of an existing scale is highlighted. The construct validity of a driver attitude scale was not confirmed by factor analysis and the original scale scores were shown to have poor to moderate internal reliability. On the basis of a re-analysis of data from 1,059 repeat traffic offenders, 39…

Against an historical backdrop, this paper summarizes four uses of intraclass correlation of importance to contemporary researchers in the behavioral sciences. First, it shows how the intraclass correlation coefficient can be used to adjust confidence intervals for statistical significance testing when data are intracorrelated and the independence…

This paper reviewed several studies supporting the idea that empathy is an important aspect of interpersonal behavior and moral conduct and providing further evidence for the validity of an empathy scale. Minres factor analyses were performed to determine the underlying structure of the empathy scale and its relationship to the California…

This study was designed to explore age and sex differences in self concept across a broad age span and with fairly large populations utilizing a common for all Ss. (Author/RK)

The central purpose of this study was to determine the effect of training of teachers in the use of elements and sequences of strategies for content development through classroom communication behaviors. (Author/RK)

This study determined reliability of the Boehm Basic Concept Test (designed to assist the primary teacher assess basic conceptual knowledge) for rural kindergarten and first grade children. They found the rural reliability to be less than that reported for urban samples especially for middle and upper class children. The reduced reliability was…