This article provides information, questions, and answers about current approaches to dropping the dropout rate of our students. For example, our current model of education is based on the mass production or assembly line model promoted by Henry Ford back in early years of the 1900s (1900-1920). This model served both factory production and…

This paper intends to construct a survey data quality strategy for institutional researchers in higher education in light of total survey error theory. It starts with describing the characteristics of institutional research and identifying the gaps in literature regarding survey data quality issues in institutional research. Then it is followed by…

Teachers need to address global climate change with students in their classrooms as evidence for consequences from these environmental changes mounts. One way to approach global climate change is through examination of authentic data. Mathematics and science may be integrated by interpreting graphs from the professional literature. This study…

Mathematics departments rarely require students to study very much logic before working with proofs. Normally, the most they will offer is contained in a small portion of a "bridge" course designed to help students move from more procedurally-based lower-division courses (e.g., abstract algebra and real analysis). What accounts for this seeming…

In this paper, we will discuss the way various features of consciousness interact with each other and with cognition, specifically, the cognition of mathematical reasoning and problem solving. Thus we are interested in how consciousness and cognition "work," in a somewhat mechanistic way, rather than in larger philosophical questions about…

A multi-faceted Rasch measurement (MFRM) model was used to analyze a clinical skills assessment of 173 fourth-year medical students in a Midwestern medical school to investigate four types of rater errors: leniency, inconsistency, halo, and restriction of range. Each student performed six clinical tasks with six standardized patients (SPs), who…

Thirty six EFL freshman students at the College of Languages and Translation, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia were given a dictation, a listening comprehension test and a decoding test. The purpose of the study was to find out whether EFL freshmen students' spelling ability correlates with their listening comprehension and decoding…

The main purpose of this study was to illustrate a polytomous IRT-based linking procedure that adjusts for rater variations. Test scores from two administrations of a statewide reading assessment were used. An anchor set of Year 1 students' constructed responses were rescored by Year 2 raters. To adjust for year-to-year rater variation in IRT…

The purpose of this presentation is to encourage college teachers of writing, inside and outside Appalachia, to look at dialect-based errors in a more expansive way even as they help students to make better choices about standard usage. The discussion, which is presented within the context of a socio-cultural perspective on bias in perceptions of…

Background: Persian English learners committed mistakes and errors which were due to insufficient knowledge of different senses of the words and collocational structures they formed. Purpose: The study reported here was conducted for a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for The Master of Arts degree, School of Graduate…