Contributions on quality assurance in education often argue that a complementary and integrated relation between internal and external evaluation of schools would be advisable. This article sets out to investigate what role internal evaluation should--or could--fulfil in relation to external evaluation. It concludes that the arguments for an…

The present study investigated if unconscious primes can be processed according to different stimulus-response (S-R) rules simultaneously. Participants performed two different S-R rules, such as judging a digit as smaller or larger than five and judging a letter as vowel or consonant. These S-R rules were administered in random order and announced…

The Baldrige quality criteria generate a number of questions that can make accreditation self-studies more productive. (Contains 4 figures and 8 notes.)

Once a lesson plan has been submitted to S.O.S., it goes to two independent evaluators, who review every part of the plan, from the title to related standards, using a common rubric. Each section of the lesson plan is rated as either Acceptable, Needs Improvement, or Unacceptable. The collective ratings of all sections of the lesson plan are then…

We examine the use of film subtitles as an approximation of word frequencies in human interactions. Because subtitle files are widely available on the Internet, they may present a fast and easy way to obtain word frequency measures in language registers other than text writing. We compiled a corpus of 52 million French words, coming from a variety…

Research has suggested that short-term memory and working memory (as measured by simple and complex span tasks, respectively) are separate constructs that are differentially related to higher order cognitive abilities. This claim is critically evaluated by reviewing research that has compared simple and complex span tasks in both experimental and…

A pair of economists at the College of William and Mary have devised a new way of comparing colleges' graduation rates--a method, borrowed from business analysis, that they believe is fairer and more useful than the techniques used by "U.S. News & World Report" and the Education Trust. That general technique of regression analysis underlies the…

The assessment of child sexual abuse has largely been ignored by behavior analysts, although behavior analytic theory and methodology, if applied, likely would advance the field. Three classic cases demonstrate historic errors that might have been avoided, had a behaviorally based approach been employed. Functional analytic interpretations are…

Introduction: Tutorial-based assessment, despite providing a good match with the philosophy adopted by educational programmes that emphasize small group learning, remains one of the greatest challenges for educators working in this context. The current study was performed in an attempt to assess the psychometric characteristics of tutorial-based…

Higher-order approximations to the distributions of fit indexes for structural equation models under fixed alternative hypotheses are obtained in nonnormal samples as well as normal ones. The fit indexes include the normal-theory likelihood ratio chi-square statistic for a posited model, the corresponding statistic for the baseline model of…

The Ethical Climate Typology (ECT) and Ethical Climate Questionnaire (ECQ) are instruments traditionally used to examine the ethical work climate in organizations. The instruments were modified to correct shortcomings acknowledged in the literature and tested on a sample of libraries. Data analysis suggested that some modifications improved the…

Speededness refers to the situation where the time limits on a standardized test do not allow substantial numbers of examinees to fully consider all test items. When tests are not intended to measure speed of responding, speededness introduces a severe threat to the validity of interpretations based on test scores. In this article, we describe…

Historically, interesting psychological theories have been phrased in terms of correlation coefficients, which are standardized covariances, and various statistics derived from them. Methodological practice over the last 40 years, however, has suggested it is necessary to transform such theories into hypotheses on covariances and statistics…

The call to teach students Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has been made by a variety of professional organizations. In addition to these national organizations, almost every state has science education guidelines calling for the teaching of evolution. Many administrators and policymakers believe that evolution is being taught,…

Reliability generalization studies have provided estimates of the mean reliability coefficients and examined factors that explain the variability in the reliability estimates across studies for many different tests and measures. Different authors have used different data analyses to do such meta-analyses, and little research has addressed whether…