Problem Statement: Learning-teaching activities bring along the need to determine whether they achieve their goals. Thus, multiple choice tests addressing the same set of questions to all are frequently used. However, this traditional assessment and evaluation form contrasts with modern education, where individual learning characteristics are…

Studying the rate of return for rural residents in minority areas can give a good explanation for the problems of children enrolling in school and dropping out. On the whole, the education rate of return for rural residents in northwest minority areas is low, the Mincer function estimate is 2%, and the Heckman model estimate is 2.49%. The rate of…

The current study applied the person-fit statistic, l[subscript z], to data from a Canadian provincial achievement test to explore the usefulness of conducting person-fit analysis on large-scale assessments. Item parameter estimates were compared before and after the misfitting student responses, as identified by l[subscript z], were removed. The…

The purpose of this study was to compare subgroups of students with various forms of learning difficulties (< 25th percentile) on cognitive and mathematics characteristics. Students with mathematics difficulty (MD, n = 105), reading difficulty (RD, n = 65), both (MDRD, n = 87), or neither (NoLD, n = 403) were evaluated on an array of cognitive…

Understanding an arithmetic operation implies, at minimum, knowing the direction of effects that the operation produces. However, many children and adults, even those who execute arithmetic procedures correctly, may lack this knowledge on some operations and types of numbers. To test this hypothesis, we presented preservice teachers (Study 1),…

The demand for distance education has been increasing at a rapid pace all around the world. This, in turn, places a special importance on the need for the development of more distance education systems. However, there is an alarming rise in the number of distance education students that drop out of the system without asking for any help. The…

In two experiments, participants judged the average numerosity between two sequentially presented dot patterns to perform an approximate arithmetic task. In Experiment 1, the response was given on a 0-20 numerical scale (categorical scaling), and in Experiment 2, the response was given by the production of a dot pattern of the desired numerosity…

Middle school students' mathematical understanding benefits from connecting mathematics to other content areas in the curriculum. This month's activity explores the issue of the scarcity of freshwater, a natural resource (activity sheets are included). This activity concentrates on the critical areas mentioned in the Common Core State…

Density functional theory (DFT) is a type of electronic structure calculation that has rapidly gained popularity. In this article, we provide a step-by-step demonstration of a DFT calculation by hand on the helium atom using Slater's X-Alpha exchange functional on a single Gaussian-type orbital to represent the atomic wave function. This DFT…

We compared 5 different statistics (i.e., G index, gamma, "d'", sensitivity, specificity) used in the social sciences and medical diagnosis literatures to assess calibration accuracy in order to examine the relationship among them and to explore whether one statistic provided a best fitting general measure of accuracy. College…

The intention of the present study is to know how students' performance on number sense based on the components of number sense and also the sub-components in it. The participants of the study are 80 six graders (12-13 year-old) from three different schools that represent the city, rural, and small town areas. The data were collected using the…

The aim of this work is to adapt and test, in a Brazilian public school, the ACE model proposed by Borkulo for evaluating student performance as a teaching-learning process based on computational modeling systems. The ACE model is based on different types of reasoning involving three dimensions. In addition to adapting the model and introducing…

This study explores the potential of using online tests for the assessment of school readiness and for monitoring early reasoning. Four tests of a face-to-face-administered school readiness test battery (speech sound discrimination, relational reasoning, counting and basic numeracy, and deductive reasoning) and a paper-and-pencil inductive…

Do concrete learning materials promote strong learning outcomes, or do they simply make learning tasks more initially accessible? Although concrete materials may offer an intuitive foothold on a topic, research on desirable difficulties suggests that more challenging tasks facilitate greater retention and transfer. In the approach introduced here,…

Applied early adolescent researchers often sample students (Level 1) from within classrooms (Level 2) that are nested within schools (Level 3), resulting in data that requires multilevel modeling analysis to avoid Type 1 errors. Although several articles have been published to assist researchers with analyzing sample data nested at two levels, few…