History education scholars have recognized the need for test validity research in recent years and have called for empirical studies that explore how to best measure historical thinking processes. The present study was designed to help answer this call and to provide a model that others can adapt to carry this line of research forward. It employed…

The increasing attention on Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) pronunciation instruction gives us an opportunity to look into the current directions of teaching CFL and the specific instructional pronunciation strategies employed by CFL teachers. This paper offers a review of empirical evidence on the use and impact of instructional pronunciation…

Abilities in scientific thinking and reasoning have been emphasized as core areas of initiatives, such as the Next Generation Science Standards or the College Board Standards for College Success in Science, which focus on the skills the future will demand of today's students. Although there is rich literature on studies of how these abilities…

The aim of this paper is to propose an analytical framework of disciplinary learning outcomes that will facilitate our understanding of the nature of disciplines and their relationships. Application of the draft analytical framework, Anderson and Krathwohl's "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives" to engineering learning outcome reference…

Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) is now widely used. However, inserting new items into the question bank of a CAT requires a great effort that makes impractical the wide application of CAT in classroom teaching. One solution would be to use the tacit knowledge of the teachers or experts for a pre-classification and calibrate during the…

Purpose: This study reports the psychometric development of the Cantonese versions of the English Computerized Revised Token Test (CRTT) for persons with aphasia (PWAs) and healthy controls (HCs). Method: The English CRTT was translated into standard Chinese for the Reading--Word Fade version (CRTT-R-[subscript WF]-Cantonese) and into formal…

This exploratory study examines the role of foreign and second language contexts in the acquisition of conventional expressions. A group of 21 ESL learners was compared to 25 EFL learners randomly selected from a larger pool. Both groups completed an aural multiple-choice discourse completion task (MC-DCT), which was developed from a previously…

The current study examined the factor structure of the Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation-Straightforward Items (BFNE-S) and the Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation-Version 2 (BFNE-II) among 151 college students from the United States. Results indicated that the BFNE-S and the BFNE-II scores demonstrated excellent internal consistency reliability.…

We explore the conditions under which short, comparative interrupted time-series (CITS) designs represent valid alternatives to randomized experiments in educational evaluations. To do so, we conduct three within-study comparisons, each of which uses a unique data set to test the validity of the CITS design by comparing its causal estimates to…

Researchers in higher education frequently evaluate institutional effectiveness as the difference between an actual and predicted graduation rate, but little is known about whether such a method is reliable or valid. This study examines the measurement properties of effectiveness scores derived from regression residuals for community colleges in…

Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) has become one of the most prominent methods in the social sciences for capturing causal complexity, especially for scholars with small- and medium-"N" data sets. This research note explores two key assumptions in fsQCA's methodology for testing for necessary and sufficient…

Background: The LIRIK, an instrument for the assessment of child safety and risk, is designed to improve assessments by guiding professionals through a structured evaluation of relevant signs, risk factors, and protective factors. Objective: We aimed to assess the interrater agreement and the predictive validity of professionals' judgments made…

In and out-of-school time (OST) experiences are viewed as complementary in contributing to students' interest, engagement, and performance in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). While tools exist to measure quality in general afterschool settings and others to measure structured science classroom experiences, there is a need…

Background: Reliability of nonprobability online volunteer panels for epidemiological purposes has rarely been studied. Objectives: To assess the quality of a questionnaire on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) administered in a nonprobability Web panel and in a random telephone survey (n = 8,992; n = 8,437, age 16-49 years). Especially, we were…

This study was set to cross-validate a bilingual Persian-English version of the Vocabulary Size Test (VST) against the monolingual English version and compare Iranian EFL learners' performance on the two versions. Various bilingual versions of the VST have been developed based on the assumption that bilingual versions are not affected by the…