The Mindset Assessment Profile is a popular questionnaire purportedly designed to measure mindset--an individual's belief in whether intelligence is malleable or stable. Despite its widespread use, the questionnaire appears to assess an individual's need for cognition and goal orientation more than mindset. We assessed the reliability, construct…

Distractor-driven multiple-choice assessment items and Rasch modeling were used as diagnostic tools to investigate students' understanding of middle school chemistry ideas. Ninety-one items were developed according to a procedure that ensured content alignment to the targeted standards and construct validity. The items were administered to 13360…

Context: Evolution from novice to expert is associated with the development of expert-type knowledge structure. The objectives of this study were to examine reliability and validity of concept sorting (ConSort[C]) as a measure of static knowledge structure and to determine the relationship between concepts in static knowledge structure and…

Research in the UK has shown that students start their university career with the goal of mastering their subject, but this focus shifts as they progress through their degree program. Studies have suggested that unlike students in the UK, Russian students continue to take a strong mastery approach to their work. The main aim of this study was to…

This proof-of-concept investigation describes a computer-based approach for deriving the knowledge structure of individuals and of groups from their written essays, and considers the convergent criterion-related validity of the computer-based scores relative to human rater essay scores and multiple-choice test scores. After completing a…