This paper discusses higher-order cognitive skills, provides examples of appropriate test item content in various subject areas, and describes higher-level cognitive skills which might be tested by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Higher-order cognitive skills are said to be more difficult to measure than simpler skills;…

Traditionally, studies of beginning reading have focused either on between-subjects' differences or on changes in reading performance characteristics induced by specific training procedures. A third approach to reading is a within-subjects' comparison of individual performance characteristics at varying difficulty levels. The present study…

An 11 page chapter from a sixth grade social studies text was used in a study assessing the complexities of comprehending social studies materials and the sensitivity of prospective and experienced teachers to these complexities. A sentence-by-sentence analysis of the thinking operations required for mastery of the material showed that numerous…

This paper describes seven interrelated studies concerned with children's understanding of sequential actions and with the effects of observing a model on this understanding. A total of 546 elementary and secondary school students served as subjects for the studies. The tasks for all of the studies involved deriving the pattern for a sequence from…

Recent assessment research joining cognitive psychology and psychometric theory has introduced a new technology, item generation. In algorithmic item generation, items are systematically created based on specific combinations of features that underlie the processing required to correctly solve a problem. Reading comprehension items have been more…

This study examined young children's cognitive engagement during classroom book reading with different types of books in Greek kindergarten schools. Twenty teachers read four books--two fiction (familiar/unfamiliar story format) and two information books (expository/narrative text). As expected, children's and teachers' cognitive engagement was…

In assessing the quality of science teaching for an effort such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), it is important to understand what is meant by scientific thinking--the search for explanations. Instruction should involve higher-order cognitive skill development, but it is difficult to measure reasoning and understanding…

A study analyzing word characteristics that make them more easily translated from English to French (or vice versa) indicates that translation efficacy is most strongly influenced by the frequency of the word in the language, its familiarity, and the similarity of the French equivalent to the English word. (Author/CB)

Reports on a study designed to assess the kinds of learning opportunities students had as they dealt with science content and the problems teachers faced in managing different kinds of assignments. Management strategies associated with these assignments are described and the effects of these strategies are considered. (Author/TW)

The 4th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2011) brings together researchers from computer science, education, psychology, psychometrics, and statistics to analyze large datasets to answer educational research questions. The conference, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, July 6-9, 2011, follows the three previous editions…

The cognitive structure of an algebra test was defined and validated using the linear test model (LLTM) and quadratic assignment (QA) techniques. The LLTM is an extension of the Rasch model with a linear constraint that describes item difficulty in terms of the cognitive operations required to solve the item. The model permits the specification of…

A study investigated how students' mental representation of an expository text and the inferences they used in summarizing varied as a function of text difficulty and of differences in the task. Subjects, 96 college students and students from grades 6 and 10, wrote summaries of expository texts and answered orally several probe questions about the…

Matrix tasks designed to assess the logical properties of multiple classification and multiple seriation were administered to 105 first, third, and fifth grade children. The tasks included cross-class and double series matrices, each of which had a reproduction and a transposition instructional set, and a revised set of cross-class and double…

The purpose of this essay is to explore both what is known and what needs to be learned about the information value of performance items "when they are used in large scale assessments." Within the context of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), there is substantial motivation for answering these questions. Over the…

The cognitive processes students use in doing the 1996 science assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were studied using two booklets from the 1993 NAEP science field test. Blocks of items from these booklets, a hands-on task block and either a conceptual/problem solving block or a theme block, were administered to 16…