The 2018 Nebraska Student-Centered Assessment System (NSCAS) Summative technical report documents the processes and procedures implemented to support the Spring 2018 NSCAS Summative English Language Arts (ELA), Mathematics, and Science assessments by NWEA under the supervision of the Nebraska Department of Education (NDE). The technical report…

The authors hypothesized that multicultural personality and ethnic identity would significantly predict variance in multicultural counseling competencies in counselor trainees, beyond the variance predicted by demographics, multicultural training, openness, and cognitive racial attitudes. Results showed multicultural personality predicted…

Many students find understanding confidence intervals difficult, especially because of the amalgamation of concepts such as confidence levels, standard error, point estimates and sample sizes. An R Shiny application was created to assist the learning process of confidence intervals using graphics and data from the US National Basketball…

The difference in how humans read and how Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems process written language leads to a situation where a portion of student responses will be comprehensible to human markers, but unable to be parsed by AES systems. This paper examines a number of pieces of student writing that were marked by trained human markers, but…

A well-known typological observation is the dominance of subject-initial word orders, SOV and SVO, across the world's languages. Recent findings from gestural language creation paradigms offer possible explanations for the prevalence of SOV. When asked to gesture transitive events with an animate agent and inanimate patient, gesturers tend to…

Purpose: Several studies can be found in the literature that investigate the performance of ? under various conditions. However no study for the effects of item difficulty, item discrimination, and ability restrictions on the performance of ? could be found. The current study aims to investigate the performance of ? for the conditions given below.…

Fear-relevant stimuli such as snakes and spiders are thought to capture attention due to evolutionary significance. Classical conditioning experiments indicate that these stimuli accelerate learning, while instructed extinction experiments suggest they may be less responsive to instructions. We manipulated stimulus type during instructed aversive…

Reality-monitoring errors occur when internally generated thoughts are remembered as external occurrences. We hypothesized that sleep-dependent memory consolidation could reduce them by strengthening connections between items and their contexts during an afternoon nap. Participants viewed words and imagined their referents. Pictures of the…

Despite common operationalization, measurement efficiency of computerized adaptive testing should not only be assessed in terms of the number of items administered but also the time it takes to complete the test. To this end, a recent study introduced a novel item selection criterion that maximizes Fisher information per unit of expected response…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of linking test scores by using test takers' background data to form pseudo-equivalent groups (PEG) of test takers. Using 4 operational test forms that each included 100 items and were taken by more than 30,000 test takers, we created 2 half-length research forms that had either 20…

Various subscore estimation methods that use auxiliary information to improve subscore accuracy and stability have been developed. This report provides a review of various subscore estimation methods described in the literature. The methodology of each method is described, then research studies on these subscore estimation methods are summarized.…

The purpose of this study was to determine which remote testing systems, all designed to ensure academic integrity, offer a realistic and secure approach to online examinations and best fulfill the needs for faculty and students. This study explored the use of 3 testing tools to determine whether there are differences in test scores and student…

The purpose of this study was to use multidimensional scaling (MDS) to investigate relations among scores from the standardization sample of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children--Fifth edition (WISC-V; Wechsler, 2014). Nonmetric two-dimensional MDS maps were selected for interpretation. The most cognitively complex subtests and indexes…

Students compare their achievement in a subject with their classmates' achievements (social comparison), their own prior achievements (temporal comparison), and their achievements in other subjects (dimensional comparison), which can each be better (upward comparison), equal (lateral comparison), or worse (downward comparison). Prior research has…

Learning from expository science texts is challenging. These studies explore whether difficulties can be attributed to poor memory or poor reasoning. To eliminate the need for memory during testing, some students took the tests with the texts available. To test for the effects of reasoning on performance, some students were prompted to engage in…