This study aims to investigate the effect of methods to deal with missing data on item difficulty estimations under different test length conditions and sampling sizes. In this line, a data set including 10, 20 and 40 items with 100 and 5000 sampling size was prepared. Deletion process was applied at the rates of 5%, 10% and 20% under conditions…

Purpose: Prior theoretical and empirical work has referenced several broad stages of narrative development, particularly in terms of young children's understanding of story structure. However, there is considerable variation in how story structure has been defined and assessed across these studies. The aims of the present study were threefold: (a)…

Apprentices' performance after vocational educational training (VET) is commonly attributed to more or less effective training. This implies the assumption that learning is significantly affected by vocational instruction (instructional sensitivity). However, the question has not been investigated yet if VETs are effective, i.e., that they foster…

Time has become a standard feature used in EDM models, and is used in models of meta-cognitive strategies to models of disengagement. Most of these models consider whether a student action is "too fast" or "too slow". However, an open question remains on how we define and select these cut-offs. Moreover, it is not clear that…

Certain item features can be used to explain the difference between the difficulties of items. These item features can relate to the steps necessary to solve the problems or ways in which a increased understanding of material is acquired. This study will examine the relationship between item difficulty and the process skills associated with these…

PISA results show that a considerable number of 15-year-old pupils after 8 to 10 years of schooling have a low level of functional reading literacy, as defined in the PISA framework. While PISA results help identify the level of reading competency, they do not reveal what might be the reasons why some students fail to solve the tasks. One way to…

The study explores how teachers perceive and go about students' thinking in connection to particular mathematical content and how they frame the notion of applied mathematics in their own classrooms. Teachers' narratives are built around two released PISA 2012 mathematics items, the 'Drip rate' and 'Climbing Mount Fuji' (will be referred to as the…

In the context of a generic harmonic oscillator, we investigated students' accuracy in determining the period, frequency, and angular frequency from mathematical and graphical representations. In a series of studies including interviews, free response tests, and multiple-choice tests developed in an iterative process, we assessed students in both…

This study investigates the psychometric characteristics of Gordon's Advanced Measures of Music Audiation (AMMA) in a region with strong non-Western music tradition. It also examines the possibility of measuring audiation with the modern psychometric theory. The AMMA test was administered to 513 students in the city of Ioannina and a number of…

Student evaluations of teaching are widely adopted across academic institutions, but there are many underlying trends and biases that can influence their interpretation. Publicly accessible web-based student evaluations of teaching are of particular relevance, due to their widespread use by students in the course selection process and the quantity…

Often, at universities, it is assumed that students will automatically find their 'voice' after a period of exposure to the academic field. What is not understood fully are the struggles that students with different levels of preparedness have in finding and asserting their academic voice, particularly in the academic writing genres necessary for…

The contribution investigates opportunities that an educational tool called Concept Cartoons can offer in future teachers' education, namely in comparison with word problems in standard written tests. The referred empirical study was conducted in two separated consecutive stages, with two groups of future primary school teachers (the first one…

An adequate level of linguistic complexity in learning materials is believed to be of crucial importance for learning. The implication for school textbooks is that reading complexity should differ systematically between grade levels and between higher and lower tracks in line with what can be called the systematic complexification assumption.…

Contribution: Findings are provided from an initial survey to evaluate the magnitude of the recursion problem from the student point of view. Background: A major difficulty that programming students must overcome--the learning of recursion--has been addressed by many authors, using various approaches, but none have considered how students perceive…

To optimize learning in lectures, students need to maintain a sustained level of attention to the lecture material. Previous research has suggested, however, that student attention declines over the course of the lecture. One strategy suggested to improve sustained attention of students during the lecture is to encourage note-taking by students.…