Young children regularly learn words from interactions with other speakers, though not all speakers are reliable informants. Interestingly, children will reverse to trusting a reliable speaker when a previously endorsed speaker proves unreliable. When later asked to identify the referent of a novel word, children who reverse trust are less willing…

Quantitative information about test score reliability can be presented in terms of the distribution of equated scores on an alternate form of the test for test takers with a given score on the form taken. In this paper, we describe a procedure for estimating that distribution, for any specified score on the test form taken, by estimating the joint…

There is an increasing demand from employers and universities for school leavers to be able to apply their mathematical knowledge to problem solving in varied and unfamiliar contexts. These aspects are however neglected in most examinations of mathematics and, consequentially, in classroom teaching. One barrier to the inclusion of mathematical…

The humble multiple-choice test is very widely used within education at all levels, but its susceptibility to guesswork makes it a suboptimal assessment tool. The reliability of a multiple-choice test is partly governed by the number of items it contains; however, longer tests are more time consuming to take, and for some subject areas, it can be…

Internists are required to perform a number of procedures that require mastery of technical and non-technical skills, however, formal assessment of these skills is often lacking. The purpose of this study was to develop, implement, and gather validity evidence for a procedural skills objective structured clinical examination (PS-OSCE) for internal…

The Campbell and Cochrane Collaborations were created to reveal the evidentiary status of claims focusing especially on the effectiveness of specific interventions. Such reviews are constrained by the population of studies available and biases that may influence this availability such as preferred framing of problems. This highlights the…

The electronic conversion of scanned image files to readable text using optical character recognition (OCR) software and the subsequent migration of raw OCR text to e-book text file formats are key remediation or media conversion technologies used in digital repository e-book production. Despite real progress, the OCR problem of reliability and…

Background: The Behaviour Problems Inventory-Short Form (BPI-S) is a spin-off of the BPI-01 that was empirically developed from a large BPI-01 data set. In this study, the reliability and factorial validity of the BPI-S was investigated for the first time on newly collected data from adults with intellectual disabilities. Methods: The sample…

There is a large body of research on the effectiveness of rater training methods in the industrial and organizational psychology literature. Less has been reported in the measurement literature on large-scale writing assessments. This study compared the effectiveness of two widely used rater training methods--self-paced and collaborative…

In just a decade, the international university rankings have become dominant measures of institutional performance for policy-makers worldwide. Bolstered by the façade of scientific neutrality, these classification systems have reinforced the hegemonic model of higher education--that of the elite, Anglo-Saxon research university--on a global…

This study reports on the psychometric evaluation of the Chinese version of the Homework Management Scale (HMS). The HMS was designed to assess students' homework management strategies. Based on a randomized split of 884 high school students in China, we conducted exploratory factor analysis on Group 1 (n = 442) and confirmatory factor analysis on…

The alignment of test items to content standards is critical to the validity of decisions made from standards-based tests. Generally, alignment is determined based on judgments made by a panel of content experts with either ratings averaged or via a consensus reached through discussion. When the pool of items to be reviewed is large, or the…

In theory the formula scoring methods increase the reliability of multiple-choice tests in comparison with number-right scoring. This study aimed to evaluate the impact of the formula scoring method in clinical anatomy multiple-choice examinations, and to compare it with that from the number-right scoring method, hoping to achieve an…

Student Growth Percentiles (SGP, Betebenner, 2009) are used to locate a student's current score in a conditional distribution based on the student's past scores. Currently, following Betebenner (2009), quantile regression is most often used operationally to estimate the SGPs. Alternatively, multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) may also be…

This paper describes the development and validation of a science teacher leadership instrument modeled on the seven domains of the Teacher Leader Model (TLM) Standards (The Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium, 2011). Instrument development was part of National Science Foundation--funded Mathematics and Science Partnership (MSP) program that…