Believing that accountability could be a vehicle for change, the California Department of Education (CDE) requires all high school students to pass the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) in order to graduate. In doing so, California joins many others states in mandating a high school exit exam as a current or future requirement for…

The North Carolina Governor's School offers a six-week residential summer program for four hundred academically talented rising juniors. This article measures the school's impact on these students in four fundamental areas: cognitive maturity, moral reasoning, personal learning style, and projections for the future. The results showed that…

This study examined the extent to which the underlying factor structure of the 2005 South Carolina Palmetto Achievement Challenge Tests (PACT) in science for grades 3, 4, and 5 was equivalent for students who were administered the test in a regular (standard) or accommodated form. Three accommodation groups were of interest: students who received…

Three computer based experiments, testing human participants in a non-immersive virtual watermaze task, used a blocking design to assess whether two sets of geometric cues would compete in a manner described by associative models of learning. In stage 1, participants were required to discriminate between visually distinct platforms. In stage 2,…

This study investigated the possibility that apparent sex differences in IQ are at least partly created by the degree of sample restriction from the baseline population. We used a nationally representative sample, the 1970 British Cohort Study. Sample sizes varied from 6518 to 11,389 between data-collection sweeps. Principal components analysis of…

Males outperform females in the Mental Rotation Test (MRT) for biological, strategic and cultural reasons. The present research tested a motivational explanation with the hypothesis that females could do better when induced to have positive beliefs and expectations. All-female and all-male samples were divided into six groups, each having listened…

In 2002, the United States Supreme Court confirmed that in the school's role of in loco parentis, drug testing of students who were involved in athletics and extracurricular activities was constitutional. In a state of the union address, George W. Bush stated that drug testing in schools had been effective and was part of "our aggressive…

Two studies are presented in which favourable and unfavourable conditions for children's meta-cognitive monitoring processes are examined. Previously reported findings have shown that especially children's uncertainty monitoring (in contrast to certainty monitoring) poses specific problems for children in their elementary school years. When…

The ASC model of choice and confidence in general knowledge proposes that respondents first Assess the familiarity of presented options, and then use the high-familiarity option as a retrieval cue to Search memory for the purposes of Constructing an explanation about why that high-familiarity option is true. The ASC process implies that…

Prior research regarding practice effects on ability tests has focused primarily on the differences in average score gains across different types of preparation (e.g., test retaking vs. focused item practice vs. coaching). In contrast, there has been little concerted effort towards understanding the significant variance in score gains across…

Two different methods of practice are available in the learning of simple information, test practice or study practice. Of these two methods of learning, research has generally shown that test practice is superior to study practice. However, this research has not considered the testing advantage with respect to the fact that test learning is…

Comments on articles by Botvinick et al. and Jacob et al. M. M. Botvinick, T. S. Braver, D. M. Barch, C. S. Carter, and J. D. Cohen (2001) implemented their conflict-monitoring hypothesis of cognitive control in a series of computational models. The authors of the current article first demonstrate that M. M. Botvinick et al.'s (2001)…

The online deployment of Technology Engineered online Student Ratings of Instruction (SRIs) by colleges and universities in the United States has dynamically changed the deployment of course evaluation. This research investigation is the fourth part of a post hoc study that analytically and psychometrically examines the design, reliability, and…

This latest report in the GMAC® Data-to-Go Series provides an overview of trends in graduate management education in Canada and a brief look at jobs and employment trends for recent 2013 business school graduates in Canada. Key themes of internationalization, program portfolio, and student recruitment appear in data throughout. Data presented here…

TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is an international assessment of mathematics and science at the fourth and eighth grades that has been conducted every four years since 1995, with the most recent assessment in 2011. PIRLS (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study) is an international assessment of reading…