In this essay, the author examines how two groups of undergraduates, from Australia and the United States, negotiate their national and global identities in the context of studying abroad. In doing so the author demonstrates the nuances of "global citizenship" as it is actually experienced. Drawing on Craig Calhoun's (2002) scholarship…

This paper describes the Generic Automated Marking Environment (GAME) and provides a detailed analysis of its performance in assessing student programming projects and exercises. GAME has been designed to automatically assess programming assignments written in a variety of languages based on the "structure" of the source code and the correctness…

During the early stage of computerized adaptive testing (CAT), item selection criteria based on Fisher"s information often produce less stable latent trait estimates than the Kullback-Leibler global information criterion. Robustness against early stage instability has been reported for the D-optimality criterion in a polytomous CAT with the…

Retrieval efficiencies of paper-based references in journals and other serials containing 10 scientific names of fossil amphibians were determined for seven major search engines. Retrievals were compared to the number of references obtained covering the period 1895-2006 by a Comprehensive Search. The latter was primarily a traditional…

A three-year national intervention program introduced into the School Psychology Service (SPS) in Norway with the aim of increasing systemic level work among SP counselors was investigated. Latent variable growth models based on longitudinal data from 195 SP counselors gave no significant mean level change in systemic level work. This concurred…

The goal of the three-tiered response-to-intervention (RtI) model is to catch students who are at risk early and to provide an appropriate level of intervention. Although RtI has been recommended for academic and social behavior, to date there has been little discussion about the differences associated with implementing RtI across these domains.…

Griffiths and Tenenbaum (2006) asked individuals to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday events (e.g., cake baking times), and reported that predictions were optimal, employing Bayesian inference based on veridical prior distributions. Although the predictions conformed strikingly to statistics of the world, they reflect…

Although English verbs can be either regular ("walk"-"walked") or irregular ("sing"-"sang"), "denominal verbs" that are derived from nouns, such as the use of the verb "ring" derived from the noun "a ring", take the regular form even if they are homophonous with an existing irregular verb: "The soldiers ringed the city" rather than "The soldiers…

Fit of the model to the data is important if the benefits of item response theory (IRT) are to be obtained. In this study, the authors compared model selection results using the likelihood ratio test, two information-based criteria, and two Bayesian methods. An example illustrated the potential for inconsistency in model selection depending on…

In this article, the relationship between two alternative methods for the analysis of multivariate categorical data is systematically explored. It is shown that the person score of the first dimension of classical optimal scaling correlates strongly with the latent variable for the two-parameter item response theory (IRT) model. Next, under the…

Presented at the national conference for AERA (American Educational Research Association) in April 2009. The large variability of SAT taker population across states makes state-by-state comparisons of the SAT scores challenging. Using a mixture modeling approach, therefore, the current study presents a method of identifying subpopulations in terms…

Models of a psychological process can be difficult to discriminate experimentally because it is not easy to determine the values of the critical design variables (e.g., presentation schedule, stimulus structure) that will be most informative in differentiating them. Recent developments in sampling-based search methods in statistics make it…

Background: This study investigates whether anxiety and depressive disorder symptoms of adolescents from the general community are best described by a model that assumes they are indicative of one general factor or by a model that assumes they are two distinct disorders with parallel growth processes. Additional analyses were conducted to explore…

IMPACT is a media and technology program designed to support and promote effective instruction through the integration of technology. The model is currently being implemented in 30 K-12 schools throughout North Carolina. This evaluation study investigated the effects of this model on the attitudes, behaviors, and activities of students and…

The compatibility between the Humboldtian principles and the Bologna reform programme is essentially contested. The article traces debates on the Humboldtian university and the Bologna process and explores theoretical, methodological and normative aspects of these debates and the relations between the Bologna process and the Humboldtian ideals.…