There's ample evidence that peer approval and group acceptance play a role in many social phenomena. This influence can manifest itself through the bystander effect, peer pressure, social facilitation and in many other ways. However, dress as a means of social influence has been largely ignored. This study was designed to determine whether peer…

This simulation study compared the performance of two multilevel measurement testlet (MMMT) models: Beretvas and Walker's (2008) two-level MMMT model and Jiao, Wang, and Kamata's (2005) three-level model. Several conditions were manipulated (including testlet length, sample size, and the pattern of the testlet effects) to assess the impact on the…

The purpose of this study was to determine if using a student-centered approach to data analysis could have an effect on the attitudes of the teachers involved in the process. Interventions were developed that would be representative of a student-centered model and implemented for a specific duration. The action research project gathered teachers'…

Artificial lexicons have previously been used to examine the time course of the learning and recognition of spoken words, the role of segment type in word learning, and the integration of context during spoken word recognition. However, in all of these studies the experimenter determined the frequency and order of the words to be learned. In three…

In education, as in other realms of life, motivation plays a crucial role in the performance of students. Deci and Ryan's (1985) Self Determination Theory identified various types of motivation along a continuum from weakest to strongest. Yet, until recently, no reliable method existed to accurately measure the strength of motivation along this…

Two of the major claims of the cognitivist approach to metaphor, the paradigm which has emerged as dominant over the last three decades, are (1) that metaphor is a conceptual, rather than strictly linguistic, phenomenon, and (2) that metaphor exemplifies processes which are at work in cognition more generally. This view of metaphor is here placed…

With scant research to draw upon with respect to the maintenance of vertical scales over time, decisions around the creation and performance of vertical scales over time necessarily suffers due to the lack of information. Undetected item parameter drift (IPD) presents one of the greatest threats to scale maintenance within an item response theory…

"Stereotype threat is being at risk of confirming, as a self-characteristic, a negative stereotype about one's group" (C. M. Steele & Aronson, 1995, p. 797). A stereotype threat effect then is described as the detrimental impact on a person's performance or achievement measurements when they are placed in a stereotype threat environment. For…

This paper examines strategies for interpreting and reporting estimates of intervention effects for subgroups of a study sample. Specifically, the paper considers: why and how subgroup findings are important for applied research, the importance of pre-specifying sub- groups before analyses are conducted, the importance of using existing theory and…

Lien, Ruthruff, Remington, & Johnston (2005) reported residual switch cost differences between stimulus-response (S-R) pairs and proposed the partial-mapping preparation (PMP) hypothesis, which states that advance preparation will typically be limited to a subset of S-R pairs because of structural capacity limitations, to account for these…

Preparation for high-stakes testing, while unavoidable, may become meaningful, these authors argue. The article illustrates the case of a third-grade classroom in a metropolitan public school, where test preparation was approached as genre study. In addition to examining the specific unit of study, the authors describe the efforts of the classroom…

In their article "Innovations in Setting Performance Standards for K-12 Test-Based Accountability," Kristen Huff and Barbara S. Plake (2010) lay out three preconditions for continued investment in standard-setting methodology and practice, all focused on the sound development and use of achievement level descriptors (ALDs). Among these…

Formative assessment probes are used not only to uncover the ideas students bring to their learning, they can also be used to reveal teachers' common misconceptions. Consider a process widely used in inquiry science--developing hypotheses. In this article, the author features the probe "Is It a Hypothesis?", which serves as an example of how…

Purpose: The current study was an attempt to provide initial evidence on how to predict the optimal language in which to conduct speech perception testing for Spanish/English (S/E) bilingual listeners. Method: Thirty normal-hearing S/E listeners differing in age of language acquisition, length of immersion, daily language use, self-rated listening…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to examine the accuracy, latency, and errors of noun (object) and verb (action) naming in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) and to determine whether children with SLI have a particularly large noun-verb performance gap. Method: Children with SLI, age-matched peers (AM), and…