In a science education methods course, groups of students were initially involved in a face-to-face discussion and were sensitized about certain conflicting claims regarding a puzzling observation or set of observations. They were then instructed to resolve their conflicting ideas through electronic discussion. Students had two weeks time to…

Modern academic libraries have a great number of information resources available online in the form of electronic catalogs, books, journals, and subject subscription databases. To determine whether users can easily retrieve the information they are seeking, academic librarians conduct usability testing of their libraries' Web sites. There has been…

The Centre for Distance Education, Athabasca University, commenced a survey of all graduates of its two programs, the master of distance education (MDE) degree, and the graduate diploma (GD) in technology, in late 2006. Alumni were asked how program completion had affected their careers, and their plans for the future. A total of 84 graduates…

Every state in the United States, under the NCLB act, has set state standards and is testing all students in grades 3-8. Students are given printed questions to which they write answers with a pencil on an answer sheet. These written tests are usually given to determine the academic achievements of students. This paper traces the early history of…

The process of examination marking is complex, requiring examiners to engage in a variety of cognitive operations. While consideration has been given to marking practices in a few specific contexts, those of General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) examiners have yet to receive serious attention. This study's aims, therefore, were: first,…

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses…

This study assessed rates of learning disabilities (LD) by several psychometric definitions in children with epilepsy and identified risk factors. Participants (N = 173, ages 8-15 years) completed IQ screening, academic achievement testing, and structured interviews. Children with significant head injury, chronic physical conditions, or mental…

Two experiments examined the restriction of referential domains during unscripted conversation by analyzing the modification and online interpretation of referring expressions. Experiment 1 demonstrated that from the earliest moments of processing, addressees interpreted referring expressions with respect to referential domains constrained by the…

A follow-up study to at least the age of 21 years of 135 individuals with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosed in childhood and an IQ of over 30 was conducted. The study is distinctive in its large size, low attrition rate and use of systematic interviews to obtain clinical information. Questionnaires completed by caregivers asked about the…

This article draws on research from Texas and Chicago to examine whether highstakes testing enables low-income and racial minority students to acquire cultural capital. While students' performance on state or district tests rose after the implementation of high-stakes testing and accountability policies in Texas and Chicago in the 1990s, several…

Blogs are web sites, which have the specific themes and are updated with the latest news, views, and trends including philosophical reflections, opinions, and social and/or political issues. Due to representing the personality of the author or the web site, the main purpose of this article is to discuss the guidelines of discerning covert racism…

Although human resource development practitioners and researchers emphasize organizational culture as a major contributor to employee learning and development, results from this study suggest organizational subculture has greater influence on employee-related learning motivation. The relationships among organizational culture, organizational…

The surge of high-stakes testing and accountability has been felt in Texas and all across the country. Every state is demanding to some degree or another that administrators and teachers increase their workload, alter their teaching, rearrange the curriculum, adjust professional development, and implement improvement programs in order to raise…

Pedhazur and Tetenbaum speculated that factor structures from self-ratings of the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) personality traits would be different from factor structures from desirability ratings of the same traits. To explore this hypothesis, both desirability ratings of BSRI traits (both "for a man" and "for a woman") and…

This study was designed to examine response rates and bias among a sample of community college students who received a district-wide survey by standard mail or e-mail. Findings suggest that predictors of response and types of responses are not appreciably different across paper and online mail-out samples when these samples are "matched" in terms…