With teacher quality repeatedly cited as the most important "schooling" factor influencing student achievement, there has been increased interest in examining the efficacy of teacher training programs. This paper presents the results of research investigating the relationship between teachers who graduate from different training programs…

Children with unilateral Cerebral Palsy (CP) have several gait impairments, amongst which impaired gait stability may be one. We tested whether a newly developed stability measure (the foot placement estimator, FPE) which does not require long data series, can be used to asses gait stability in typically developing (TD) children as well as…

Purpose: We examined the impact that cycle ergometry exercise had on percent body fat (%BF) estimates when assessed using either leg-to-leg or segmental bioelectrical impedance analysis (LBIA; SBIA) and whether the intensity of the exercise bout impacts the %BF magnitude of change. Method: Seventy-four college-aged adults participated in this…

Preservation of equity properties was examined using four equating methods--IRT True Score, IRT Observed Score, Frequency Estimation, and Chained Equipercentile--in a mixed-format test under a common-item nonequivalent groups (CINEG) design. Equating of mixed-format tests under a CINEG design can be influenced by factors such as attributes of the…

In software systems, having features of openness means that some of the internal components of the system are made available for examination by users. Researchers have looked at different effects of open systems a great deal in the area of educational technology, but also in areas outside of education. Properly used, openness has the potential to…

The purpose of this study was to determine the screening measures used to assess students entering kindergarten in he state of Indiana. In addition, this study sought to determine how the data from these measures are used to inform classroom reading instruction. Eighty-nine schools participated in the study and sixty-two of those schools completed…

Authorship attribution of source code is the task of deciding who wrote a program, given its source code. Applications include software forensics, plagiarism detection, and determining software ownership. A number of methods for the authorship attribution of source code have been presented in the past. A review of those existing methods is…

Alternative assessment techniques are essential for increasing student learning in blended and online courses. Rather than simply answer multiple-choice questions, students can choose activities in an academic contract. By using a contract, students will be active participants in their own learning. Contracts add a dimension of authenticity to…

Background/Context: The evolution of validity understandings from mid-century to now has emphasized that test validity depends on test purpose--adding consequence considerations to issues of interpretation and evidentiary warrants. Purpose: To consider the tensions created by multiple purposes for assessment and sketch briefly how we got to where…

The issue of measurement invariance commonly arises in factor-analytic contexts, with methods for assessment including likelihood ratio tests, Lagrange multiplier tests, and Wald tests. These tests all require advance definition of the number of groups, group membership, and offending model parameters. In this paper, we study tests of measurement…

The study of media culture and virtual world requires knowledge and skills of the analysis of media texts of different levels of complexity. In this sense, the cinematic legacy of the great French writer, screenwriter and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008) gives productive opportunities for the analysis of works of the elite media culture…

Internationally, many assessment systems rely predominantly on human raters to score examinations. Arguably, this facilitates the assessment of multiple sophisticated educational constructs, strengthening assessment validity. It can introduce subjectivity into the scoring process, however, engendering threats to accuracy. The present objectives…

This contribution to the Ethics section is intended to foster discussion about the relationship between multicultural competence and ethics; a timely discussion especially in view of the release in 2011 of the American Evaluation Association's Public Statement on Cultural Competence (http://www.eval.org/ccstatement.asp). Over the course of 2011,…

The role of accountability is becoming increasingly complex. Regional, state, programmatic, and national accreditors, as well as the constituents, demand to know why a problem exists, what the underlying causes are, and how schools are going to fix it. From a proactive standpoint, institutions want to delineate, and in some cases are required to…

This article suggests a method to deal with cross-linguistic differences in children with Specific Language Impairment. The differences in vulnerable structures reflect typological properties of the surrounding language (e.g., Leonard 2014a, 2014b). This article adds a developmental perspective to the discussion by interpreting the vulnerable…