Student evaluation of teaching (SET) is now common practice across higher education, with the results used for both course improvement and quality assurance purposes. While much research has examined the validity of SETs for measuring teaching quality, few studies have investigated the factors that influence student participation in the SET…

The purpose of the present studies was to test the hypothesis that the psychometric characteristics of ability scales may be significantly distorted if one accounts for emotional factors during test taking. Specifically, the present studies evaluate the effects of anxiety and motivation on the item difficulties of the Rasch model. In Study 1, the…

Recent findings (see, for example, Muñoz and Singleton, 2011) indicate that age of onset is not a strong determinant of instructed foreign language (FL) learners' achievement and that age is intricately connected with social and psychological factors shaping the learner's overall FL experience. The present study, accordingly, takes a…

Longitudinal research in higher education faces several challenges. Appropriate methods of analyzing competence growth of students are needed to deal with those challenges and thereby obtain valid results. In this article, a pretest-posttest-posttest multivariate multilevel IRT model for repeated measures is introduced which is designed to address…

Previous research suggests that in classes that take an integrated approach to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education, students tend to engage in fulfilling goals of their engineering design challenges, but only inconsistently engage with the related math and science content. The present research examines these inconsistencies…

The study investigated whether school-level protective factors could moderate the effects cumulative risk has upon behavior difficulties in children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). The sample comprised 4,288 children identified with SEND: 2,660 pupils within 248 primary schools, and 1,628 pupils within 57 secondary schools.…

Memory performance in linear order reasoning tasks (A > B, B > C, C > D, etc.) shows quicker, and more accurate responses to queries on wider (AD) than narrower (AB) pairs on a hypothetical linear mental model (A -- B -- C -- D). While indicative of an analogue representation, research so far did not provide positive evidence for spatial…

The present study undertook a multilevel analysis on how school administrators' view of the diffusion of adopting technologies in instruction at school level affected teachers' acceptance of the use of these technologies in actual teaching, which, hypothetically, in turn influences students' learning effectiveness. Thirteen Taiwanese high schools…

Ratio and proportional relationships are of primary importance during the upper elementary and middle school grades (Kilpatrick, Swafford, & Findell, 2001; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 1989, 2000; National Mathematics Advisory Panel [NMAP], 2008). These relationships, along with the interrelated topics of fractions, decimals,…

Quantway is a Carnegie Math Pathways initiative which redesigns the content, pedagogy, and structure of traditional developmental math courses to simultaneously tackle traditional barriers of student success and support a broader range of developmental students in achieving their math potential. Specifically, Quantway is a quantitative reasoning…

Higher education institutions play a key role in helping to shape students' interests and career plans; as such, student affairs practitioners should understand how the co-curricular environments in their domain contribute to students' career development. The purpose of this study is to explore how one specific co-curricular experience,…

Performance funding for higher education has gained popularity in many countries, but its impact on institutional performance remains unclear. This study investigates the impact of performance funding on the institutional performance of Korean universities over time. The institutional performance indicators used include graduates' employment rate,…

Many young readers fail to construct a proper mental text representation, often due to a lack of higher-order skills such as making integrative and inferential links. In an eye-tracking experiment among 141 Dutch eighth graders, we tested whether coherence markers (moreover, after, because) improve students' online processing and their off-line…

Background: Reading delays are well documented in children with fragile X syndrome (FXS), but few studies have examined linguistic precursors of reading in this population. This study examined the longitudinal development of phonological awareness and its relationship with basic reading in boys with FXS. Individual differences in genetic,…

For college graduates entering the workforce, contributing to an employer-sponsored 401(k) retirement plan can be an important way of saving for the future. However, contribution rates for young people in these plans are far below recommended percentages, leading to concerns about future financial stability for these individuals. Prior work has…