There has long been a need for a larger body of data supporting the difference in achievement among students educated in an environment rich in the arts. The 21st century has seen an emphasis on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) education to prepare students for future jobs in STEM fields. Global competition for technological…

Users of forced-choice questionnaires (FCQs) to measure personality commonly assume statement parameter invariance across contexts -- between Likert and forced-choice (FC) items and between different FC items that share a common statement. In this paper, an empirical study was designed to check these two assumptions for an FCQ assessment measuring…

Academic writing is a salient skill for medical students all over the world. Academic writing starts with composing effective paragraphs, laying the foundation for students' advancement in writing during college. This study investigated common mistakes in English paragraph writing committed by the first-year medical students of the Medicine…

This study examines the predictive validity of high school grade point average and ACT® Composite score on first-year college grade point average prior to and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The findings reveal that the predictive power of high school grade point average changed significantly after 2020, suggesting that students…

GRE Aptitude Test scores have been a key criterion for admissions to U.S. graduate programs. However, many universities lifted their standardized testing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic, and many decided not to reinstate them once the pandemic ended. This change poses additional challenges in evaluating prospective students. In this…

Maintaining equivalent performance standards across forms is a psychometric challenge exacerbated by small samples. In this study, the accuracy of two equating methods (Rasch anchored calibration and nominal weights mean) and four anchor item selection methods were investigated in the context of very small samples (N = 10). Overall, nominal…

Recent research has suggested that re-setting the standard for each administration of a small sample examination, in addition to the high cost, does not adequately maintain similar performance expectations year after year. Small-sample equating methods have shown promise with samples between 20 and 30. For groups that have fewer than 20 students,…

The purpose of this quantitative post measure only experimental study was to determine if, or to what extent, the use of emojis by a chatbot pedagogical agent in a threaded conversation is effective in eliciting social presence, human-like, and engaging perceptions by adult learners living in North America. Social presence theory provided the…

Research exploring the educational relevance of wellbeing only tentatively confronts the 'tension' of expecting educators to nurture pupils' wellbeing while school effectiveness is evaluated by metrics of academic performance. Complete wellbeing includes hedonia (feeling) and eudaimonia (doing) well. Accordingly, school 'happiness agendas'…

States are responsible for evaluating teacher preparation programs (TPPs) through program reviews. We use data from Massachusetts to describe the first analysis of program review ratings and their relationship to in-service outcomes for TPP graduates. When comparisons are made across all schools and districts in the state, a TPP's review scores…

How does conceptual structure of external representations contribute to learning? This investigation considered the influence of generative concept sorting and of external structure information moderated by perceived difficulty. In Study 1, undergraduate students completed a perceived difficulty survey and comprehension pretest, then a sorting…

In this randomized controlled trial with controls for student characteristics, the authors used a loss-aversion strategy to test whether students achieve greater learning gains from combining research-based instructional strategies with loss aversion. Students in the control group began the class with no grades and built their course average by…

Test scores are often used to make decisions about examinees, such as in licensure and certification testing, as well as in many educational contexts. In some cases, these decisions are based upon compensatory scores, such as those from multiple sections or components of an exam. Classification accuracy and classification consistency are two…

This study assesses whether student exclusions from PISA 2018 in Sweden followed the criteria set by the OECD. We do this using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Our conclusion is that the exclusions made in PISA 2018 in Sweden did not follow OECD criteria and were much too high. Furthermore, interviews with school coordinators indicate…

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has accentuated the role and interplay of numerous educational factors, inviting pedagogical research concerning online education. Using self-determination theory's basic psychological needs and fundamental learning theories, identified educational factors were integrated into three pathways: (1)…