Evidence shows that students who are actively engaged with learning materials demonstrate greater learning gains than those who are passively engaged. Indeed, cognitive engagement is often cited as a critical component of an educational experience. However, understanding how and in what ways cognitive engagement occurs remains a challenge for…

Stimuli encoded shortly before an aversive event are typically well remembered. Traditionally, this emotional memory enhancement has been attributed to beneficial effects of physiological arousal on memory formation. Here, we proposed an additional mechanism and tested whether memory formation is driven by the unpredictable nature of aversive…

The present study set out to explore the locus of the poorly understood but frequently reported and comparatively large practice effect in sustained attention tests. Drawing on a recently proposed process model of sustained attention tests, several cognitive tasks were administered twice in order to examine which specific component of test…

International trended assessments have long attempted to provide instructional information to educational researchers and classroom teachers. Studies have shown that traditional methods of item analysis have not provided specific information that can be directly applicable to improve student performance. To this end, cognitive diagnosis models…

The aim of this study is to examine validity and reliability of Community of Inquiry Scale commonly used in online learning by the means of Item Response Theory. For this purpose, Community of Inquiry Scale version 14 is applied on 1,499 students of a distance education center's online learning programs at a Turkish state university via internet.…

In this article, we highlight the need for a precisely defined construct in score-based validation and discuss the contribution of cognitive theories to accurately and comprehensively defining the construct. We propose a framework for integrating cognitively based theoretical and empirical evidence to specify and evaluate the construct. We apply…

The authors describe the development and validation of the Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth (AFQ-Y), a child-report measure of psychological inflexibility engendered by high levels of cognitive fusion and experiential avoidance. Consistent with the theory underlying acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), items converged into a…

The purpose of the study is to present research focused on validating the four algebra cognitive models in Gierl, Wang, et al., using student response data collected with protocol analysis methods to evaluate the knowledge structures and processing skills used by a sample of SAT test takers.

Procedural documentation is presented for administering, scoring and analyzing data gathered to examine the construct validity of a set of superitems developed to assess student levels of mathematical reasoning ability. Each superitem includes a mathematical situation and a structured set of questions about that situation. The questions were based…

Grounded in a review of existing theories and research on problem solving, the theoretical base and new instrument development efforts discussed in this publication have been sounded against the needs of an innovative, interdisciplinary curriculum project called Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools (USMES). It is the work on new…

A model of verbal performance was developed which defined cognitive processes thought to underlie performance on the Word Knowledge and Paragraph Comprehension subtests of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). The items from two forms of these ASVAB verbal subtests were rated on five conceptualized cognitive storage processes:…

The differences in types of information-processing skills developed by different instructional backgrounds affect, negatively or positively, the learning of further advanced instructional materials. If prior and subsequent instructional methods are different, a proactive inhibition effect produces low achievement scores on a post test. This poses…

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…