Behavioral flexibility allows individuals to adapt to situations in which rewards and goals change. Potentially addictive drugs may impair flexible decision-making by altering brain mechanisms that compute reward expectancies, thereby facilitating maladaptive drug use. To investigate this hypothesis, we tested the effects of oxycodone exposure on…

Introduction: Computerized tests have become one of the most widely used and efficient educational assessment methods. Increasing efforts to generate computerized assessment systems to identify students at risk for drop out have been recently noted. An important variable influencing student retention is academic satisfaction. Accordingly, the…

The present study pioneered in adopting test accommodations to validate the Thinking Styles Inventory-Revised II (TSI-R2; Sternberg, Wagner, & Zhang, 2007) among Chinese university students with hearing impairment. A series of three studies were conducted that drew their samples from the same two universities, in which accommodating test…

In the interest of clarifying how gesture facilitates L2 word learning, the current study investigates gesture's influence on three interrelated cognitive processes subserving L2 word learning: communication, encoding, and recall. Individuals unfamiliar with Hungarian learned 20 Hungarian words that were either accompanied or unaccompanied by…

Not much is known about how people comprehend ironic utterances, and to date, most studies have simply compared processing of ironic versus non-ironic statements. A key aspect of the graded salience hypothesis, distinguishing it from other accounts (such as the standard pragmatic view and direct access view), is that it predicts differences…

Life sciences became Biology, a formal scientific discipline, at the turn of the nineteenth century, when it adopted the methods of reductive physics and chemistry. Mendel's hypothesis of inheritance of discrete factors further introduced a quantitative reductionist dimension into biology. In 1910 Johannsen differentiated between the…

It is a well-known problem in testing the fit of models to multinomial data that the full underlying contingency table will inevitably be sparse for tests of reasonable length and for realistic sample sizes. Under such conditions, full-information test statistics such as Pearson's X[superscript 2] and the likelihood ratio statistic G[superscript…

The first college mathematics course a student enrolls in is often affected by performance on a college mathematics placement test. Yet validity evidence of mathematics placement tests remains limited, even for nationally standardized placement tests, and when it is available usually consists of examining a student's subsequent performance in…

This study looks at the real and perceived effects of inter-candidate variation in linguistic ability during pair-tested oral examinations in a southern Italian context. Pair testing has not been taken up in schools and universities in southern Italy despite its wide use in international testing systems. Colleagues and prospective candidates often…

The Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression (CES-D) scale is a well-known self-report instrument that is used to measure depressive symptomatology. Respondents who take the full-length version of the CES-D are administered a total of 20 items. This article investigates the use of curtailment and stochastic curtailment (SC), two sequential…

Validity evidence based on test content is important for educational tests to demonstrate the degree to which they fulfill their purposes. Most content validity studies involve subject matter experts (SMEs) who rate items that comprise a test form. In computerized-adaptive testing, examinees take different sets of items and test "forms"…

The first large-scale, nationwide academic achievement testing program using Stanford Achievement Test (Stanford) for deaf and hard-of-hearing children in the United States started in 1969. Over the past three decades, the Stanford has served as a benchmark in the field of deaf education for assessing student academic achievement. However, the…

This study sought to determine how students would describe their group-only cooperative testing experiences in terms of key elements of cooperative learning often cited in the literature. Written comments of 159 graduate students were analyzed and 26 related categories of comments were derived from 495 statements of students enrolled in two…

Since it was introduced in Forster and Davis (1984), masked priming has been widely adopted in the psycholinguistic research on visual word recognition, but there has been little consensus on its actual mechanisms, i.e. how it occurs and how it should be interpreted. This dissertation addresses two different interpretations of masked priming, one…

This research extends creativity theory by re-conceptualizing creativity as a two-dimensional construct (radical and incremental) and examining the differential effects of intrinsic motivation, extrinsic rewards, and supportive supervision on perceptions of creativity. We hypothesize and find two distinct types of creativity that are associated…