Test score users often demand the reporting of subscores due to their potential diagnostic, remedial, and instructional benefits. Therefore, there is substantial pressure on testing programs to report subscores. However, professional standards require that subscores have to satisfy minimum quality standards before they can be reported. In this…

Friendships are widely considered to be an essential part of life in college and beyond. The existing literature on college friendships, academic achievement, and student attrition is mixed, which may occur as a result of varying ways of defining friendship. This study adds to an understanding of these dynamics by examining both the number of…

Factor loadings and item discrimination parameters play a key role in scale construction. A multitude of heuristics regarding their interpretation are hardwired into practice--for example, neglecting low loadings and assigning items to exactly one scale. We challenge the common sense interpretation of these parameters by providing counterexamples…

Differences in rater judgments that are systematically related to construct-irrelevant characteristics threaten the fairness of rater-mediated writing assessments. Accordingly, it is essential that researchers and practitioners examine the degree to which the psychometric quality of rater judgments is comparable across test-taker subgroups.…

Much has been written about the importance of giving personal attention to children's written work. The focus has been on the effect of this feedback on the writing and on the child. Drawing on the philosophical discourse of the care of the self, I argue that the ways in which a teacher gives feedback informs the development of the teacher.…

This study examines the role of nature in relation to emotional highs in adult learning. Hermeneutic phenomenology was used as an overarching methodology and contained both descriptive and interpretive elements. The methodology enabled access to an exploration of the phenomenon with further interpretation of the experiences of the 21 adults who…

Background: Compared to the general population, individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) more often experience bullying and its negative social and emotional impacts. Prior studies explored bullying of individuals with IDD primarily through investigations of the perspectives of others and the negative impacts of bullying.…

Model selection is important in any statistical analysis, and the primary goal is to find the preferred (or most parsimonious) model, based on certain criteria, from a set of candidate models given data. Several recent publications have employed the deviance information criterion (DIC) to do model selection among different forms of multilevel item…

The Born rule, which describes the formalism for determining probabilities, is one of the most fundamental postulates in quantum mechanics. This paper presents results from an investigation into how students apply the Born rule to determine probabilities for energy and position measurements. The investigation includes two stages with independent…

Many large universities, community colleges and some smaller four-year colleges are turning to hybrid or online instruction for remedial and entry level mathematics courses, often assessed using online exams in a proctored computer lab environment. Faculty face the task of choosing questions from a publisher's text bank with very little, if any,…

The number of immigrant students enrolling in California schools is increasing and teaching them effectively requires adapted approaches to affirm their linguistic and cultural diversity. Educators feel underprepared to meet the complex needs of students who represent hundreds of languages and cultures. Many immigrant children are frequently also…

While design-based pedagogies have increasingly been emphasized, the assessment of design projects remains difficult due to the large number of potentially "correct" solutions. Adaptive comparative judgment (ACJ), an approach based on assessors/judges working through a series of paired comparisons and selecting the better of two items,…

Typical approaches to assessing students' understanding of the engineering design process (EDP) include performance assessments that are time-consuming to score. It is also possible to use multiple-choice (MC) items to assess the EDP, but researchers and practitioners often view the diagnostic value of this assessment format as limited. However,…

Survey research is still confronted by a trend of increasing nonresponse rates. In this context, several methodological advances have been made to stimulate participation and avoid bias. Yet, despite the growing number of tools and methods to deal with nonresponse, little is known about whether nonresponse biases show similar trends as nonresponse…

The purpose of this study was to examine intellectually gifted students' attitude towards mathematics. Affective domain has been considered as one of the pillar of giftedness although a limited number of studies have been carried out related to this issue and gifted students' attitude towards mathematics has rarely been investigated. The…