Divergent thinking is an integral process in creativity. Openness to experience is a personality trait that relates to divergent thinking and, therefore, is hypothesized to be related to creative performance among the students. The effects of openness to experience are likely to be partially mediated by an individual's attitude toward divergent…

The pressing need for English oral communication skills in multifarious contexts today is compelling impetus behind the large number of studies done on oral proficiency interviewing. Moreover, given the recently articulated concerns with the fairness and social dimension of such interviews, parallel concerns have been raised as to how most fairly…

In the Fall of 2010, the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) approached Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) to commission a report of system-wide performance for their first full school year of testing as part of the BIE-NWEA Project. Even with only a single year of testing data, some patterns were identified and they are listed in this report.…

As an extension of the effort devoted to updating the questionnaires for TIMSS and PIRLS 2011, this dissertation explored a new reporting strategy for contextual questionnaire data. The study investigated the feasibility of constructing "global indicators" from a large number of diverse background variables, which could provide policy…

"Harvard Education Letter" is published bimonthly at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This issue of "Harvard Education Letter" contains the following articles: (1) Hybrid Schools for the iGeneration: New Schools Combine "Bricks" and "Clicks" (Brigid Schulte); (2) Dual Language Programs on the Rise: "Enrichment" Model Puts Content Learning…

The purpose of this study was to examine the characteristics of reading test items that may differentially impede the performance of students with disabilities. The findings suggest that there are certain revisions that can be done on current assessments to make them more accessible for students with disabilities. Features such as words per page,…

Achievement goal theory is considered to be a well-researched field. However, this research has been primarily through surveys, and not enough attention has been paid to the cognitive aspects of how children perceive goals. Additionally, the mastery-avoidance construct is relatively new to the achievement goal literature, with little research to…

The computer-based testing mode has received limited research as a task condition for elementary students as it relates to comprehension for both narrative and expository text. The majority of schools now use computer-based testing to measure students' progress for end of the year exams. Additionally, schools are also delivering state-wide…

This dissertation investigates the effects of phonological neighborhoods on pronunciation variation in conversational speech. Phonological neighbors are defined as words that are different in one and only one phoneme by addition, deletion and substitution. Phonological neighborhood density refers to the number of neighbors a certain word has. …

Schools are drowning in test data, but many schools do little with test results other than sort students into various categories of proficiency or lack thereof. Some educators feel testing has taken the joy out of teaching. Others believe valuable instructional time has been lost as a result of testing. Yet, NCLB and other federal and state…

In this article we describe a semester-long project, based on the popular video game series Guitar Hero, designed to introduce upper-level undergraduate statistics students to statistical research. Some of the goals of this project are to help students develop statistical thinking that allows them to approach and answer open-ended research…

In many developed cultures there is an assumption that IQ is intelligence. However, emerging theories of multiple intelligences, of emotional intelligence, as well as the application of IQ testing to other cultural groups, and to people with disability, raises many questions as to what IQ actually measures. Despite recent research that shows IQ…

Studies of bilingualism sometimes require healthy subjects to be assessed for proficiency at auditory sentence processing in their second language (L2). The Syntactic Comprehension task of the Bilingual Aphasia Test could satisfy this need. For ease and uniformity of application, we automated its English (Paradis, M., Libben, G., and Hummel, K.…

Students with disabilities face a vast array of physical, cognitive, social, and external barriers. The combination of barriers and negative attitudes faced by students with disabilities makes it difficult to develop skills to be more independent in future academic and career-related settings. This article examines the importance of faculty…

The speech produced by human vocal tract is a complex acoustic signal, with diverse applications in phonetics, speech synthesis, automatic speech recognition, speaker identification, communication aids, speech pathology, speech perception, machine translation, hearing research, rehabilitation and assessment of communication disorders and many…