In this study we sought to identify profiles of talk during Head Start preschool mealtime conversations involving teachers and students. Videos of 44 Head Start classrooms' lunch interactions were analyzed for the ratio of teacher-child talk and amount of academic vocabulary, and then coded for instances of academic/food, social/personal, and…

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of nutrition and sexual health education on healthy lifestyle behaviours of teacher candidates (HLSB). In the research, a quasi-experimental research one-group pretest-posttest design, a quantitative research method, was used. The sample of the study consisted of 60 pre-service teachers studying…

This brief summarizes five benefits of schools providing the PreACT® to all their students. The PreACT 8/9 (an earlier version of the PreACT test that is more appropriate for students in grades 8 and 9) and PreACT assessments are designed to provide students with an indication of their educational progress in the context of preparing for the ACT®…

The purpose of this quantitative causal comparative study was to ascertain the effectiveness of the integrated Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) program on student achievement scores in Jamaica. This study utilized archival student examination data from 3 years and 2 inner-city high schools, 1 STEM and 1 non-STEM. The study was…

Since 2015, the City University of New York (CUNY), serving over 250,000 students through 25 two- and four-year colleges, and high schools in the New York Standards Performance Consortium (the Consortium), which use performance-based assessments to assess student progress, have collaborated to add authentic evidence of student learning to the…

Statement of Purpose and Method of Study: Historically, Mississippi has lagged behind the rest of the nation in student achievement and funding for education. This comparative quantitative study investigated whether significant differences in student achievement as measured by mean composite ACT scores of high school juniors in Mississippi public…

International student enrollment has experienced dramatic increases on U.S. campuses. Using a national dataset, the study explores and compares international and domestic students' incoming and post-training levels of motivation to lead, leadership self-efficacy, and leadership skill using inverse-probability weighting of propensity scores to…

We propose a comprehensive procedure for the implementation of a quality control process of anchor tests for a college admissions test with multiple consecutive administrations. We propose to examine the anchor tests and their items in connection with covariates to investigate if there was any unusual behavior in the anchor test results over time…

Policy and practice have charged forward with emphasizing the necessity to reduce school absenteeism in the fall (i.e., Attendance Awareness Month). However, no empirical basis served to bolster these efforts. This study examined whether fall versus spring absenteeism was linked to spring state exam scores for a sample of elementary students over…

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and quasi-experimental designs like regression discontinuity (RD) designs, instrumental variable (IV) designs, and matching and propensity score (PS) designs are frequently used for inferring causal effects. It is well known that the features of these designs facilitate the identification of a causal estimand…

This study investigated students' successes, strategies, and common errors in their answers to questions that involved the electron-pushing (curved arrow) formalism (EPF), part of organic chemistry's language. We analyzed students' answers to two question types on midterms and final exams: (1) draw the electron-pushing arrows of a reaction step,…

Researchers addressing posttreatment complications in randomized trials often turn to principal stratification to define relevant assumptions and quantities of interest. One approach for the subsequent estimation of causal effects in this framework is to use methods based on the "principal score," the conditional probability of belonging…

There is an increasing interest in reporting test subscores for diagnostic purposes. In this article, we review nine popular R packages (subscore, mirt, TAM, sirt, CDM, NPCD, lavaan, sem, and OpenMX) that are capable of implementing subscore-reporting methods within one or more frameworks including classical test theory, multidimensional item…

Person-fit assessment (PFA) is concerned with uncovering atypical test performance as reflected in the pattern of scores on individual items on a test. Existing person-fit statistics (PFSs) include both parametric and nonparametric statistics. Comparison of PFSs has been a popular research topic in PFA, but almost all comparisons have employed…

Purpose: This study examined intelligibility of conversational and clear speech sentences produced in quiet and in noise by children, young adults, and older adults. Relative talker intelligibility was assessed across speaking styles. Method: Sixty-one young adult participants listened to sentences mixed with speech-shaped noise at -5 dB…