Effective school studies, for the most part, have focused on different individual school-level independent variables influencing student achievement and have largely neglected examining contextual variables within the school or school community that may evolve as a result of responding to statewide accountability pressures, including examining how…

Teacher quality has become a top priority of our national agenda. There is empirical evidence that suggests that teacher inputs have impact on student outcomes. It is also believed that teacher dispositions are as crucial for student achievement as a teacher's pedagogical and content knowledge/skills. The National Council for Accreditation of…

In the current study, the child AQ was administered in Japan, to examine whether the UK results for reliability and validity generalize to a different culture. Assessment groups were: Group 1: n = 81 children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA); Group 2: n = 22 children diagnosed PDD-NOS with average IQ; and Group 3: n =…

The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) is one of the most widely used social desirability scales. The authors conducted a reliability generalization study to examine the typical reliability coefficients of BIDR scores and explored factors that explained the variability of reliability estimates across studies. The results indicated…

Behavioral difficulties of school-aged students are typically dealt with in a reactive, rather than preventative manner. This article examines a proactive approach, consistent with the Response-to-Intervention model, using a screening measure designed to identify students at risk for behavior difficulties and targeting these students for early…

Purpose: To assess and compare youth satisfaction with two delivery approaches to a HIV/STD risk reduction intervention targeting adolescents: an on-site, face-to-face (FTF) approach versus a long distance interactive televised (DIT) approach. Methods: A convenience sample of 571 rural adolescents ages 12-16 years who participated in an HIV/STD…

This article reports the development and initial validation of scores obtained from the Adolescent Concerns Measure (ACM), a scale which assesses concerns of Asian adolescent students. In Study 1, findings from exploratory factor analysis using 619 adolescents suggested a 24-item scale with four correlated factors--Family Concerns (9 items), Peer…

A common challenge facing immigrant families is intergenerational-intercultural conflict. Social workers are in need of an easy-to-use but psychometrically sound measure to assess this phenomenon and evaluate treatment effectiveness. The Intergenerational Congruence in Immigrant Families (ICIF) Scale was created for this purpose. The ICIF has two…

Two inherently contradictory forces are pushing for reform in portfolio assessment. On the one hand there is a felt need for creating more rigid standards that operate to promote uniformity of ratings in appraisal practice to certify achievement. However, on the other hand, critical questions are being raised about separating acclaimed portfolio…

A study investigated possible causes of high percentages of students failing the Ohio Ninth Grade Proficiency Test (ONGPT) in mathematics. The validity of the math test may be questionable. The reading and math scores of over 200 ninth-grade students from a rural school in northwest Ohio were used as a basis. Only scores from the fall of 1991,…

A study investigated 42 native English-speakers' (NSs) perceptions of the pragmatic appropriateness of refusal statements. The NSs rated the appropriateness of 24 written statements in 4 different refusal scenarios, which were collected from both native speakers and non-native speakers. Four weeks later, as a reliability check, the subjects rated…

A qualitative case study examined professor and student perceptions regarding how professors use communication to build their classroom credibility and the influence of the professor's race in the establishment of credibility. The research design reflects the vantage point of an African-American female researcher acknowledging and incorporating…

This study demonstrates the advantages of using a constrained optimization algorithm to explore the optimal number of prompts, modes of discourse, and raters for achieving an acceptable level of reliability during a direct writing assessment. Writing samples elicited from 50 college students were rated by 3 graduate students and the scores…

This paper presents findings of a study that developed, measured, and tested the Organizational/Supervisory (O/S) Model of Instructional Supervision. The six dimensions of the Organizational Supervisory Climate Inventory (OSCI)--organizational structure, professional autonomy, collaborative sharing, district supervisory climate, reflection, and…

M. J. Kolen, B. A. Hanson, and R. L. Brennan (1992) presented a procedure for assessing the conditional standard error of measurement (CSEM) of scale scores using a strong true-score model. They also investigated the ways of using nonlinear transformation from number-correct raw score to scale score to equalize the conditional standard error along…