One of the methods used most often to assess students' friendships and friendship networks is the reciprocal nomination method. However, an often heard complaint is that this technique produces rather negative outcomes. This study compares the reciprocal nomination method with another method to assess students' friendships and friendship networks:…

In this study, the authors aimed to examine 8 of the different methods for computing confidence intervals around alpha that have been proposed to determine which of these, if any, is the most accurate and precise. Monte Carlo methods were used to simulate samples under known and controlled population conditions wherein the underlying item…

Measurement of race and ethnicity is integral to assessing and addressing health disparities experienced by minorities. However, the unique experiences of Latinos related to race and the discordance between understandings of race among Latinos and the predominant U.S. conceptualizations of this construct impact how Latinos respond to measurement…

Although most adopted children are well adjusted, research has consistently found that adopted adolescents are at an increased risk for externalizing behaviors. The present investigation tested a model whereby parent-adolescent negative emotionality traits, adolescent conflict, and adoption status contribute to adolescent externalizing behaviors.…

Minimal research to date has evaluated the impact of Survey-Question-Read-Recite-Review (SQ3R) implementation (i.e., surveying prior to reading, generating questions, reading to answer said questions, reciting, and reviewing information) on content retention and student performance. Existing research is anecdotal or lacks ecological validity. The…

Onset asynchrony is an important cue for auditory scene analysis. For example, a harmonic of a vowel that begins before the other components contributes less to the perceived phonetic quality. This effect was thought primarily to involve high-level grouping processes, because the contribution can be partly restored by accompanying the leading…

Measurement of nonlinearity in social service research and evaluation relies primarily on spatial analysis and, to a lesser extent, social network analysis. Recent advances in geographic methods and computing power, however, allow for the greater use of simulation methods. These advances now enable evaluators and researchers to simulate complex…

The synthetic function is a weighted average of the identity (the linking function for forms that are known to be completely parallel) and a traditional equating method. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the benefits of the synthetic function on small-sample equating using various real data sets gathered from different…

Models for measuring individual response precision have been proposed for binary and graded responses. However, more continuous formats are quite common in personality measurement and are usually analyzed with the linear factor analysis model. This study extends the general Gaussian person-fluctuation model to the continuous-response case and…

The purpose of this study was to assess the role of common motor responses as the "speaker" behavior on stimulus class formation,and the emergence of functional classes. Experiment 1 examined whether training one motor response to a set of three stimuli and a second motor response to another set of three stimuli would result in correct…

Three studies are presented in this paper that address how nonsigners perceive the visual prosodic cues in a sign language. In Study 1, adult American nonsigners and users of American Sign Language (ASL) were compared on their sensitivity to the visual cues in ASL Intonational Phrases. In Study 2, hearing, nonsigning American infants were tested…

Despite the present economic difficulties facing all levels of the nation's educational enterprise, a significant portion of education's resources continue to be used for evaluative activities. As a result, presumably competent evaluation personnel are sought after to evaluate activities in nearly every area of education and its cognate fields.…

A large proportion of national education and treatment centers for persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), including those providing applied behavior analysis (ABA)-based services, show a relatively high percentage of agreement among practitioners on the instruments they routinely use for a variety of purposes, including curriculum design…

I report a study that investigated ideas about critical thinking across three disciplines: Philosophy, History and Literary Studies. The findings point to a diversity of understandings and practices, ones that suggest the limitations of a more generic approach. I argue that a more useful conception of critical thinking is as a form of…

The Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) is one of the world's leading educational research centres. ACER's mission is to create and promote research-based knowledge, products and services that can be used to improve learning across the life span. This annual report describes ACER's milestones and accomplishments for the 2016-2017…