Large-scale educational surveys are low-stakes assessments of educational outcomes conducted using nationally representative samples. In these surveys, students do not receive individual scores, and the outcome of the assessment is inconsequential for respondents. The low-stakes nature of these surveys, as well as variations in average performance…

Higher education institutions in South Africa continue variously to experience a range of contestations that are analogous much of the time to "war by other means". However, if we stand back from our divided social lives and the mandate that history visits on our institutions, not to absolve anyone but to yield to what the imperatives…

Pediatric View is an evaluation project that began in 1999 and is located at Western Pennsylvania Hospital in Pittsburgh. The purpose of Pediatric View is to provide developmental and functional vision evaluations to children who have ocular or cortical visual impairments. The evaluations are generally two hours in length, and a detailed report…

The Supports Intensity Scale (SIS) is used to determine the profile and intensity of the supports needed by a person to participate successfully in major life activities. With its publication into 13 languages, a need has arisen to document its reliability and validity across language and cultural groups. Here we explain the adaptation and the…

Purpose: The original version of the Direct Assessment of Functional Status (DAFS), a measure of instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), was found to have a ceiling effect in older adults living independently in the community. This suggested that the tasks measured, although relevant, do not require full use of this population's…

As there is a dearth of Spanish-language standardized scales that assess adaptive behavior in children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities (ID), the authors adapted one of the most widely used and studied scales of adaptive behavior in the U.S., the ABS-S:2 (Adaptive Behavior Scale-School, 2nd Edition), and validated it for use in…

Psychometric properties of item response theory proficiency estimates are considered in this paper. Proficiency estimators based on summed scores and pattern scores include non-Bayes maximum likelihood and test characteristic curve estimators and Bayesian estimators. The psychometric properties investigated include reliability, conditional…

The evaluation of teaching has sparked much debate for many decades. There are several reasons why the debate about evaluation and ratings continues, but the underlying problems in evaluation are more complex than a simple, valid-invalid or reliable-unreliable dichotomy suggests. The issues are often buried beneath bipolar rhetoric that has been…

The Prudhoe Cognitive Function Test (PCFT) directly measures the cognitive abilities of people with intellectual impairment. This study examined the relationship between this instrument and the Kaufman Brief Intelligence Test (K-BIT) and two shorter versions of the same scale. High correlations between the verbal and performance sections of the…

The Hoffmann reflex is obtained through surface electromyographic recordings, and it is one of the most common neurophysiological techniques in exercise science. Measurement and evaluation of the peak-to-peak amplitude of the Hoffmann reflex has been guided by the observation that it is a variable response that requires multiple trials to obtain a…

This article presents a review of the "NEPSY-Second Edition" (NEPSY-II), an updated and modified version of the NEPSY (Korkman, Kirk, & Kemp, 1998). The NEPSY-II is an individually administered compendium of tests designed to assess neuropsychological development in children ranging from 3 to 16.11 years old. The authors of the…

A total of 4 raters, including 2 teachers and 2 research assistants, used Direct Behavior Rating Single Item Scales (DBR-SIS) to measure the academic engagement and disruptive behavior of 7 middle school students across multiple occasions. Generalizability study results for the full model revealed modest to large magnitudes of variance associated…

In this study we will analyze the attitude of older adults to advertisements, differentiating between advertisements that contain rhetorical figures (trope ads) and those that do not (explicit ads). We will also study their attitude toward the brand advertised according to their degree of involvement with the product. In the course of the…

The aim of this study was to develop and validate an observer-based coding system for the characterization and completion of homework assignments during Behavioral Activation (BA). Existing measures of homework completion are generally unsophisticated, and there is no current measure of homework completion designed to capture the particularities…

How do children know the sentence "the glass is empty and not empty" is inconsistent? One possibility is that they are sensitive to the formal structure of the sentences and know that a proposition and its negation cannot be jointly true. Alternatively, they could represent the 2 state of affairs referred to and realize that these are…