The causes of gender differences in nonverbal behavior are not well understood. The present article discusses status as a possible explanation and analyzes some of the methodological and conceptual challenges associated with testing that hypothesis. The study by Helweg-Larsen, Cunningham, Carrico, and Pergram (2004), which investigated gender in…

Now that many credentialing exams are being routinely administered by computer, new computer-based test designs, along with item response theory models, are being aggressively researched to identify specific designs that can increase the decision consistency and accuracy of pass-fail decisions. The purpose of this study was to investigate the…

In this article, I use concepts from Michel Foucault to analyze the ways in which the high-stakes accountability movement has appropriated the technology of the examination to redefine the educated subject as a normalized case. Partly this has become possible because of the role that educational research has played in laying out the conditions for…

In the domain of electrical circuits troubleshooting, a full factorial experiment investigated the hypotheses that (a) studying worked examples would lead to better transfer performance than solving conventional problems, with less investment of time and mental effort during training and test, and (b) adding process information to worked examples…

The question of what it means to follow the "Standards" is discussed. It is argued that the "Standards" consists of statements of general principles, and that interpretation for specific applications requires professional judgment. As a result, disagreements among professionals on the applicability of particular standards to specific situations…

Items of mental rotation tests can not only be solved by mental rotation but also by other solution strategies. A multigroup latent class analysis of 24 items of the Mental Rotations Test (MRT) was conducted in a sample of 1,695 German pupils and students to find out how many solution strategies can be identified for the items of this test. The…

Latent Inhibition (LI) attenuation when a long delay is introduced between acquisition and test phases has been repeatedly observed using aversive conditioning procedures (e.g., Aguado, Symonds, & Hall, 1994). This effect has been used as evidence to support those theories that consider LI to be the result of a retrieval failure. We designed three…

Many purported demonstrations of irrational behavior rely on the assumption that participants believe key task parameters that are merely asserted by experimenters. For example, previous researchers have found that participants who first reported confidence in items presented in a yes-no format did not change confidence to the degree prescribed by…

This article proposes an item exposure control method, which is the extension of the Sympson and Hetter procedure and can provide item exposure control at both the item and test levels. Item exposure rate and test overlap rate are two indices commonly used to track item exposure in computerized adaptive tests. By considering both indices, item…

This work inaugurates a critical inquiry into whether the ideas of Karl Popper, a philosopher of science, are used by astronomers and astrophysicists, a practicing community of scientists. It examines four basic components of Karl Popper's philosophy falsification, prohibition, simplicity, and risk taking and the extent that these themes become…

This study investigates the current research practice concerning reporting measurement validity evidence based on a sample of 696 research reports listed in the American Psychological Association's Directory of Unpublished Experimental Mental Measures. Only 55% of the reports included any type of validity evidence. This was a substantially lower…

Although there has been a substantial growth in the number of published studies examining tests of cognitive abilities and using contemporary theories of cognitive abilities, to date none have done so with preschool cognitive tests. In this study the relation between cognitive ability measures for young children and Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC)…

This article describes an example which is useful when teaching hypothesis testing in order to highlight the interrelationships that exist among the level of significance, the sample size and the statistical power of a test. The example also allows students to see how what they learn in the classroom directly affects the content of some of the…

Elementary students in programs for gifted and highly gifted students were tested using the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition (SB5). Students' scores on the SB5 were significantly lower than their scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III). In addition, rank order was not well preserved between…

Children aged 2 and 3 years were tested for a previously neglected form of knowledge about visual perception; namely, whether an observer can see a figure that is partially occluded. The results indicate that for children of this age the visibility of a figure's face is crucial for judging visibility, whereas the visibility of the legs is not.…