Assessment as classroom activities is a fundamental process required to determine the extent to which intended learning outcomes has been achieved. Whatever form of assessment is employed to measure students' learning, they should include tasks that are authentic, relevant and approximate skills students will need in real-life situations. These…

Studies of incidental vocabulary acquisition in second language learning have got more and more attention both at home and abroad. By first introducing the definition and theoretical foundations of incidental vocabulary acquisition, this paper reviews empirical studies of effect of different tasks on incidental vocabulary acquisition and points…

The current study examined the impact of retention interval task difficulty on 4- and 5-year-olds' prospective memory (PM) to test the hypothesis that children periodically monitor their intentions during the retention interval and that disrupting this monitoring may result in poorer PM performance. In addition, relations among PM, working memory,…

The purpose of this inquiry was to investigate the effectiveness of item response theory (IRT) proficiency estimators in terms of estimation bias and error under multistage testing (MST). We chose a 2-stage MST design in which 1 adaptation to the examinees' ability levels takes place. It includes 4 modules (1 at Stage 1, 3 at Stage 2) and 3 paths…

This work is part of the debate regarding the possibility to judge the creativity of a particular object (an idea, a painting, an industrial product, etc.), by expert or nonexpert raters, with the same results or not. The study is focused on the concept "complexity of judgment" considered fundamental to fully understand the problem. The…

This study explores the relationship between participating in a graduate course aimed at enhancing teachers' theoretical and practical knowledge of mathematical creativity and one teacher's changing perspectives regarding mathematical creativity and tasks that may occasion mathematical creativity. Results indicated that perceptions of…

Early childhood practice has often been described as complex in both policy documents and research literature; however, less attention has been given to exploring the nature and consequences of complexity in early childhood practice. At a time of intense policy attention in many national contexts, there is the potential for closing down, as well…

Cultural consensus theory (CCT) is a data aggregation technique with many applications in the social and behavioral sciences. We describe the intuition and theory behind a set of CCT models for continuous type data using maximum likelihood inference methodology. We describe how bias parameters can be incorporated into these models. We introduce…

The determination of Pass/Fail decisions over Borderline grades, (i.e., grades which do not clearly distinguish between the competent and incompetent examinees) has been an ongoing challenge for academic institutions. This study utilises the Objective Borderline Method (OBM) to determine examinee ability and item difficulty, and from that…

Research on variables related to test performance has produced mixed results. Typically, research of this type involves only a few variables. In an attempt to obtain a more complete picture, we investigated how test grades might be related to variables such as classification, student seating location, test completion time, predicted grade, time…

Students engage in higher-order thinking as they read complex texts and perform complex reading-related tasks. However, the most consequential assessments, high-stakes tests, are currently limited in providing information about students' higher-order thinking. In this article, we describe higher-order thinking in relation to reading. We provide a…

The purpose of our study is to examine business students' perceptions of their online class experience relative to the traditional in-class experience; specifically, whether a descriptive, theoretical or analytical course would be preferred as an online or traditional course. Two hundred and ninety students enrolled in upper-level business courses…

Previous mathematics and science education research indicates that knowledge and beliefs, including teaching efficacy, affect teachers' actions and effectiveness in a classroom. Our middle grades and high school Self-Efficacy to Teach Statistics (SETS) instruments, aligned with the statistical concepts in national and state guidelines such as the…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

Background: While illustrations are widely used in international test comparisons, very scant research has been conducted on their design and on their influence on student performance. It is not clear how the features of illustration act in combination supporting students' access to the content of items or increasing their interpretation demands.…