Ensuring construct comparability is a prerequisite for testing cross-group differences, yet this assumption is rarely tested in mentoring research. More studies testing for factorial invariance are needed for the construct validation of mentoring. Multiple group confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) were used to investigate the factorial stability…

Brothen and Wambach (2001) found that under certain conditions students do not benefit from online resources. They awarded points toward the course grade for high performance on small sets of practice questions and concluded student strategies in completing these quizzes were not beneficial to course performance. We investigated student use of…

State assessment systems continue to evolve as federal requirements change and more students are included in the assessment systems. An examination of states' participation and accommodations policies in place at the beginning of the accountability requirements set by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 revealed that policies for both…

The author breaks down the debate over high-stakes testing into three politically charged issues: how test scores are used as a means to reform schools; whether test designs and passing scores truly reflect students' abilities; and how public perception of schools can be unfairly based on test results alone.

This article presents results of a comparison between paper and computer tests of ability in Chemistry and Computing. A statistical model is employed to analyse the experimental data from almost 200 candidates. It is shown that there is no medium effect when specific traditional paper examinations in Chemistry and Computing are transferred into…

This essay is a philosophical and sociological reconsideration of the nature of teaching and work. It draws broadly from the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu and materialist models of the economic subject. It begins from an acknowledgment and review of the critiques of current policy orientations to testing and accountability in the United States,…

For many reasons, paper-based tests of course content are shifting to computer-based administration. This investigation examined student performance on two separate tests delivered either by computer or paper with the first test near the start of the course and the second at the end of the course. Undergraduate-level freshman business majors…

As a principal facing the task of figuring out all the complexities of the No Child Left Behind legislation, Kenneth Remsen, has concluded there is a strong belief that testing students is the answer to bringing about improvements in student performance. Because testing seems to be a cornerstone to improving performance, he doesn't understand why…

Slowness in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been attributed to intrusive thoughts or meticulousness. Recent research suggests that slowness in OCD may be particularly evident on tests of executive function subserved by frontostriatal circuitry. In the present study, the speed and accuracy of responding on neuropsychological tests of…

Observers demonstrate an impaired ability to report the second of two targets in a "rapid serial visual presentation" (RSVP) stream if it appears within 500 ms of the first target--a phenomenon known as the "attentional blink." This study investigated the fate of stimuli in dual-target RSVP streams that do not require report--the distractors. In…

Blanton and Jaccard questioned the 4-test regression method used by Greenwald et al. to test a pure multiplicative theory. The present authors address Blanton and Jaccard's concerns with a combination of simulations and meta-analysis. Simulations show that (a) Blanton and Jaccard's preferred simultaneous regression method has a severe power loss…

Does the modality of instructional messages affect learning? How does it affect different media? In this paper, I offer an answer to these questions by first proposing a theoretical framework from which effective instructional methods can be derived. Then, I report a set of studies where one method, the modality principle, was tested across…

Although most discussions today start from the assumption that the secular rise in IQ must be environmental in origin, three reasons warrant giving the genetic phenomenon heterosis a closer look as a potential cause. First, it easily accounts for both the high heritability and low shared environmental effects seen in IQ, findings that are…

Category-based inference is crucial for using past experiences to make sense of new ones. One challenge to inference of this kind is that most entities in the world belong to multiple categories (e.g., a jogger, a professor, and a vegetarian). We tested the hypothesis that the "degree of coherence" of a category-the degree to which category…

Dominant theories of implicit learning assume that implicit learning merely involves the learning of chunks of adjacent elements in a sequence. In the experiments presented here, participants implicitly learned a nonlocal rule, thus suggesting that implicit learning can go beyond the learning of chunks. Participants were exposed to a set of…