This article relates the efforts of faculty at one community college to define standards for achievement of two SLOs (critical thinking and effective communication) and to gather and analyze evidence of how well students meet those standards. Faculty from 13 disciplines assessed writing samples from 265 students. We found that, in general,…

Maintaining score stability is crucial for an ongoing testing program that administers several tests per year over many years. One way to stall the drift of the score scale is to use an equating design with multiple links. In this study, we use the operational and experimental SAT® data collected from 44 administrations to investigate the effect…

This thesis consists of two parts. In Chapter 2, we focus on the spatial scan statistics with overdispersion and Chapter 3 is devoted to the randomized permutation test for identifying local patterns of spatial association. The spatial scan statistic has been widely used in spatial disease surveillance and spatial cluster detection. To apply it, a…

Klingner and Boardman (this issue) offer a cogent and compelling argument for opening the door for the acceptance and use of mixed methods in special education research. Self-identifying as pragmatists, they embody this paradigmatic view by focusing on the utility, efficacy, and accuracy of mixed methods, an argument that should appeal to the…

The current study was the 1st to examine the psychometric properties of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule for Children-Parent Version (PANAS-C-P) using a large school-based sample of children and adolescents ages 8 to 18 (N = 606). Confirmatory factor analysis supported a 2-factor (correlated) model of positive affect (PA) and negative…

When respondents answer paper-and-pencil (PP) questionnaires, they sometimes modify their responses to correspond to previously answered items. As a result, this response bias might artificially inflate the reliability of PP questionnaires. We compared the internal consistency of PP questionnaires to computerized questionnaires that presented a…

Contemporary educational accountability systems, including state-level systems prescribed under No Child Left Behind as well as those envisioned under the "Race to the Top" comprehensive assessment competition, rely on school-level summaries of student test scores. The precision of these score summaries is almost always evaluated using models that…

The authors report on the nature of assessing functional caregiving (FC) via three studies, conducted by a university-public preschool collaboration that was designed to measure mothers' confidence to care for children with intellectual disabilities in their homes. Caregiving of children with intellectual disabilities was conceptualized in terms…

This article presents a review of the "KeyMath-3 Diagnostic Assessment" (KeyMath-3 DA), a norm-referenced individually administered diagnostic test. This review focuses only on the KeyMath-3 DA Form-A starter kit, which includes a manual, two easels, and record forms. The KeyMath-3 DA is an updated mathematics diagnostic test with the content…

The author reviews "Scales for Assessing Emotional Disturbance-Second Edition" (SAED-2; Epstein & Cullinan, 2010), an assessment system primarily designed to assist in determining eligibility for special education services under the category of emotional disturbance (ED), as defined by the "Individuals with Disabilities…

This Monte Carlo simulation study investigated methods of forming product indicators for the unconstrained approach for latent variable interaction estimation when the exogenous factors are measured by large and unequal numbers of indicators. Product indicators were created based on multiplying parcels of the larger scale by indicators of the…

Relationships between adults and parents are characterized by positive and negative qualities. Existing measures of relationship qualities and ambivalence often rely on items that are unbalanced in number of positive and negative items, emotional tone, or missing negative items completely. Three studies established validity (construct, convergent,…

The original SOCO Scale was reduced to 10 items by Thomas, Soutar, and Ryan (2001). The author conducted a pretest and a posttest in his Personal Selling class during the Fall 2009 semester. Significant differences by gender, student sales experience and family member in the sales field were identified. The author once again pretested the…

Assessing conceptual understanding of foundational topics before instruction on higher-order concepts can provide chemical educators with information to aid instructional design. This study provides an instrument that can be used to identify students' alternative conceptions regarding thermochemistry concepts. The Thermochemistry Concept Inventory…

This study used an experimental approach to investigate the conditions under which creative outcomes should be expected from the interplay of individual creativity, the innovation orientation of the organizational culture, and the rewards distribution rules. The results of this study suggest that the individual creativity of technically educated…