Building hovercraft has proven very popular with the author's engineering students at Knightstown Community High School. The activity uses inexpensive, readily available materials: foam board, a pop-up water bottle cap, a balloon, and hot glue. In this article, the author describes the hovercraft project and how the project provides excellent…

Listeners rapidly adapt to many forms of degraded speech. What level of information drives this adaptation, however, remains unresolved. The current study exposed listeners to sinewave-vocoded speech in one of three languages, which manipulated the type of information shared between the training languages (German, Mandarin, or English) and the…

Interest is growing at the precollege level in computer testing (CT) instead of paper-and-pencil testing (PT) for subjects in the school curriculum, including economics. Before economic educators adopt CT, a better understanding of its likely effects on test-taking behavior and performance compared with PT is needed. Using two volunteer student…

To investigate undergraduate students' perceptions of the role of the textbook in psychology courses, the authors surveyed 311 psychology students. Using an online survey, students answered questions about textbook importance, usage, and preferences and about scenarios that described a textbook as a resource or central course element. If an…

A well-edited assessment can enhance student's learning motives. Applicability of items, which includes item content and template, plays a crucial role in authoring a good assessment. Templates in discussion contain not only conventional true & false, multiple choice, completion item and short answer but also of those interactive ones. Methods…

Rewards that are not immediately available are discounted compared to rewards that are immediately available. The more a person discounts a delayed reward, the more likely that person is to have a range of behavioral problems, including clinical disorders. This latter observation has motivated the search for ions that reduce discounting. One…

The way forward to better assessment begins with the conception of assessment not as a single test but as a coherent "system" of measures. Coherent systems must be composed of valid measures of learning and be horizontally, developmentally, and vertically aligned to serve classroom, school, and district improvement. Coherent assessment…

Diagnostic scores are of increasing interest in educational testing due to their potential remedial and instructional benefit. Naturally, the number of educational tests that report diagnostic scores is on the rise, as are the number of research publications on such scores. This article provides a critical evaluation of diagnostic score reporting…

This article presents lessons learned from a story of a snowy and dangerous intersection where there was no way for pedestrians to cross. The basic theme of this paper is that if political economy is preoccupied largely with the measurement of externalities, then a goal for the testing and assessment policy community should be to devise strategies…

This paper provides a snapshot of educational measurement professionals--their educational, professional and demographic backgrounds, as well as their workplace settings, job tasks, professional involvement, and compensation practices. Two previous studies have surveyed employers, but this is the first attempt to conduct a comprehensive survey of…

Students learn to examine the distributional assumptions implicit in the usual t-tests and associated confidence intervals, but are rarely shown what to do when those assumptions are grossly violated. Three data sets are presented. Each data set involves a different distributional anomaly and each illustrates the use of a different nonparametric…

Mainstream scientists often claim that australopithecines such as the specimen nicknamed "Lucy" exhibit anatomy intermediate between that of apes and that of humans and use this as evidence that humans evolved from australopithecines, which evolved from apes. On the other hand, creationists reject evolution and claim that australopithecines are…

In this study I compared results of chained linear, Tucker, and Levine-observed score equatings under conditions where the new and old forms samples were similar in ability and also when they were different in ability. The length of the anchor test was also varied to examine its effect on the three different equating methods. The three equating…

Researchers in education are often interested in determining whether independent groups are equivalent on a specific outcome. Equivalence tests for 2 independent populations have been widely discussed, whereas testing for equivalence with more than 2 independent groups has received little attention. The authors discuss alternatives for testing the…

This column offers an overview of the requirements for including and accommodating English-language learners (ELLs) in content assessments and an explanation of how accommodations for ELLs work. It concludes with recommendations drawn from research and practice to ensure accommodations are assigned and implemented in ways that are likely to…