Principals (policymakers) disagree as to whether U. S. student performance has changed over the past half century. To inform conversations, agents administered seven million psychometrically linked tests in math (m) and reading (rd) in 160 survey waves to national probability samples of cohorts born between 1954 and 2007. Estimated change in…

An administrative rule allowed students who failed an exam to retake it shortly after, triggering strong `teach to the test' incentives to raise these students' test scores for the retake. We develop a model that accounts for truncation and find that these students score 0.14 standard deviations higher on the retest. Using a regression…

We study sibling spillover effects on the school performance of the elder sibling from the younger sibling using data on multi-children households in rural China. We use the variation in the younger sibling's schooling status to parse out the spillover effects and exploit the arbitrary school enrollment eligibility cutoff dates imposed by the…

An equating procedure for a testing program with evolving distribution of examinee profiles is developed. No anchor is available because the original scoring scheme was based on expert judgment of the item difficulties. Pairs of examinees from two administrations are formed by matching on coarsened propensity scores derived from a set of…

Feinberg and Wainer (2014) provided a simple equation to approximate/predict a subscore's value. The purpose of this note is to point out that their equation is often inaccurate in that it does not always predict a subscore's value correctly. Therefore, the utility of their simple equation is not clear.

The goal of this article is to introduce the revised Conceptual Understanding Weighting System (CUWS) Greene & Shorter (2012, Trans. Dial.), a tool for categorizing and weighting a mathematical task in order to identify the level of conceptual understanding being assessed by the task. In addition, there is discussion of how this weighting…

Impact of science is one of the most important topics in scientometrics. Recent developments show a fundamental change in impact measurements from impact on science to impact on society. Since impact measurement is currently in a state of far reaching changes, this paper describes recent developments and facing problems in this area. For that, the…

Antipsychotic treatment in youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is becoming increasingly common, placing individuals at risk for antipsychotic-induced weight gain and associated complications. Metformin hydrochloride, a biguanide medication FDA-approved for treatment of type-2 diabetes in youth, may hold promise for treatment of…

By aggregating residual gain scores (the differences between each student's current score and a predicted score based on prior performance) for a school or a teacher, value-added models (VAMs) can be used to generate estimates of school or teacher effects. It is known that random errors in the prior scores will introduce bias into predictions of…

Even though there is an increasing interest in response styles, the field lacks a systematic investigation of the bias that response styles potentially cause. Therefore, a simulation was carried out to study this phenomenon with a focus on applied settings (reliability, validity, scale scores). The influence of acquiescence and extreme response…

The authors asked a group of students during a classroom research study to analyze data sets containing different amounts of noise. The authors use the word "noise" to refer to statistical variability. The four students in the group were finishing seventh grade and participating in summer mathematics instruction. The authors carefully…

Validating performance standards is challenging and complex. Because of the difficulties associated with collecting evidence related to external criteria, validity arguments rely heavily on evidence related to internal criteria--especially evidence that expert judgments are internally consistent. Given its importance, it is somewhat surprising…

Purpose: This study explored the role of auditory feedback in the regulation of oral-nasal balance in speech. Method: Twenty typical female speakers wore a Nasometer 6450 (KayPentax) headset and headphones while continuously repeating a sentence with oral and nasal sounds. Oral-nasal balance was quantified with nasalance scores. The signals from 2…

Estimates of the global prevalence of learning disabilities (LD) range from 5-17%. A host of negative outcomes have been associated with LD, particularly for people of low socioeconomic status within developed nations and for people in developing nations. The goal of this study was to identify global research priorities that address the persistent…

The study of empathy, as both a concept and a construct, spans disciplines and decades. As such, its relevance to relationships, empirical definition, significance to leadership, motivational factors, and position in emotional intelligence comprise a wide range of perceptions, applications, and examination across fields ranging from psychology to…