Many teachers gaze in wonder at the professional teaching standards to which they are expected to adhere. Such standards too often ask more of teachers than they can possibly deliver. It is especially disconcerting that teaching standards are actually at odds with an educational environment dominated by ill-conceived accountability schemes and…

Using correct statistical concepts is an important component when conducting quantitative research. Ideas such as power, effect size, and confidence intervals need to be addressed appropriately every time a research study is initiated. The intent of this review of the literature is to reacquaint faculty, practitioners, and graduate students with…

Methods for testing hypotheses concerning the regression parameters in linear models for the latent person parameters in item response models are presented. Three tests are outlined: A likelihood ratio test, a Lagrange multiplier test and a Wald test. The tests are derived in a marginal maximum likelihood framework. They are explicitly formulated…

We tested the hypothesis that overestimations of performance by children with learning disabilities (LD) are self-protective and will dissipate following positive feedback. Twenty-three boys and 17 girls with LD (ages 10.6 to 13.5 years) and a control group of non-LD matched children (22 boys and 17 girls) provided a prediction of their…

Three methods of detecting item drift were compared: the procedure in BILOG-MG for estimating linear trends in item difficulty, the CUSUM procedure that Veerkamp and Glas (2000) used to detect trends in difficulty or discrimination, and a modification of Kim, Cohen, and Park's (1995) x 2 test for multiple-group differential item functioning (DIF),…

Two models are presented in this article for estimating the proportion of students who would pass all of three or more content area tests given that none have actually been tested in more than two of the content areas. The first model allows one to estimate the proportion of students who would pass all of three or more content area tests from the…

The results from 3 category learning experiments suggest that items are better remembered when they violate a salient knowledge structure such as a rule. The more salient the knowledge structure, the stronger the memory for deviant items. The effect of learning errors on subsequent recognition appears to be mediated through the imposed knowledge…

The authors examined the relationships among life role salience, role strain, coping efficacy, and life satisfaction for adults (N = 125) who combine multiple life roles. Causal modeling procedures were used to test hypotheses based on D. E. Super's (1980, 1990) life-span, life-space theory and the social cognitive career theory (R. W. Lent, S. D.…

Background: Previous work has inconsistently reported difficulties with response reversal/extinction in children with psychopathic tendencies. Method: We tested the hypothesis that the degree of impairment seen in children with psychopathic tendencies is a function of the salience of contingency change. We investigated the performance of children…

The majority of the models which attempt to explain category-specific deficits are based on the assumption that the conceptual knowledge is represented in a permanent way in memory (abstractive view). Carbonnel, Charnallet, David, and Pellat (1997) showed that a non-abstractive view would be more suitable to account for some of these cases. The…

Illness scripts are knowledge structures composed of consequences, enabling conditions, and faults. The effects of illness script components--consequences and enabling conditions--and physician factors on referral decisions for gastrointestinal disorders were investigated. The hypothesis that consequences and enabling conditions increase the…

Eight experiments examined the conditions under which a color singleton that is presented for the 1st time without prior announcement captures attention. The main hypothesis is that an unannounced singleton captures attention to the extent that it deviates from expectations. This hypothesis was tested within a visual-search paradigm in which…

The article discusses knowledge management as a means of changing the way administrators carry out their role as instructional leaders. Knowledge management utilizes many concepts from learning organizations, encourages the formation of communities of practice, and employs best practices as a means of leading others to improve learning. Instead of…

According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), during early development, perception of nonredundantly specified properties is facilitated in unimodal stimulation as compared with bimodal stimulation. Later in development, attention becomes more flexible and infants can detect nonredundantly specified properties in both unimodal and…

This paper analyzes prosodic variables in a corpus of eighteen oral presentations made by students of Technical English, all of whom were native speakers of Swedish. The focus is on the extent to which speakers were able to use their voices in a lively manner, and the hypothesis tested is that speakers who had high pitch variation as they spoke…