The purpose of this study was to explore the use of concept map assessments in freshman level general chemistry courses. Two strategies were employed in this study. The first strategy involved the creation of a web based concept mapping program capable of scoring concept maps drawn by students. The second strategy involved comparing different…

Reviewed are the Balthazar Scales of Adaptive Behavior, Section 1: The Scales of Functional Independence, which deal with adaptive functioning of profoundly and severly mentally retarded persons in areas of eating, dressing, and toileting. (MC)

Investigates a reversed cloze procedure in which high information words are deleted from a passage. Concludes that this procedure is both reliable and unique. (VJ)

Native and nonnative speakers' approaches to evaluating student errors are compared, and it is argued that the teacher's assessment is likely to be influenced by such factors as his/her own language competence, familiarity with the learners, teaching priorities, and syllabus as well as frequency and degree of linguistic deviance. (MSE)

Describes research leading to the development of SEEQ (Students' Evaluations of Educational Quality), a program which collects college students' evaluations of teacher effectiveness. Three tables, a 29-item reference list, and appendices outlining the information contained in the SEEQ survey and in the SEEQ summary report are included. (JL)

Two brief scales were proposed to assess effectiveness of teaching in laboratory and seminar/discussion group classes. (Author)

The various costs of Type I and Type II errors of inference from data are discussed. Six methods for minimizing each error type are presented, which may be employed even after data collection for Type I and which minimizes Type II errors by a study design and analytical means combination. (Author/CM)

School psychologist estimates of language arts grades through clinical inspection of Rotter protocols and the grammatical errors found on the test were correlated with actual semester grades earned in language arts. Most types of errors correlated significantly with semester grades, but clinical inspection yielded the highest correlation (.54)…

Empirical results from two studies--a simulation study and an experimental one--indicated that, in achievement data of the problem-solving type where a specific subject matter area is being tested, the greater the variety of the algorithms used, the higher the dimensionality of the test data. (Author/PN)

Subjecting the comprehension passages of the Gates-McGinitie Reading Test to readability analysis using a multiformula computer program revealed that the instrument can best be used for making comparisons between groups using the same test forms and levels in the same sequence. (FL)

Describes the Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale for Adolescents (MARS-A). Discusses psychometric data that relate to reliability and construct validity of the MARS-A scale. Results showed the association between high mathematics anxiety scale scores and low grade average in mathematics courses reported on two samples of students. (Author/JAC)

Analyzed the reliability, abnormality, and validity of Verbal Performance discrepancy scores on the WISC-R in relation to clinical decision making about learning disabilities. Suggests the information of greatest value seems to be the magnitude of the discrepancy that is both reliable and valid for learning-disabled children. (Author)

Obtained normative data from 305 children on a Coding Recall Measure adapted from the WISC-R. Although coding recall has face validity as a visual memory measure, there are some contradictions to such clinical use in view of possible lack of representativeness of the sample and limited reliability and validity. (Author/JAC)

Questions the results of an earlier study that found that accommodating instructional style to disadvantaged students' interaction patterns increases the students' achievement-related behavior. (AEA)

Believing that examinee-by-item interaction should be conceptualized as true score variability rather than as a result of errors of measurement, Lu proposed a modification of Hoyt's analysis of variance reliability procedure. Via a computer simulation study, it is shown that Lu's approach does not separate interaction from error. (Author/RL)