The adverse effect of increasing age and/or body weight on distance run performance has been well documented. Accordingly, nearly all five kilometer (5K) road races employ age categories and, sometimes, a heavier body weight classification. Problems with such conventions include small numbers of runners within older age categories and the…

Large-scale testing programs involving classification decisions typically have multiple forms available and conduct equating to ensure cut-score comparability across forms. A test developer might be interested in the extent to which an examinee who happens to take a particular form would have a consistent classification decision if he or she had…

This article presents an engaging activity in which high school students use a dichotomous key to guide the creation and classification of model insects from recycled plastic lids and containers. Besides teaching the use of a dichotomous key and the effect of evolutionary descent upon groupings of organisms, this activity focuses on an…

Latent class analysis (LCA) has been successfully applied to tasks measuring higher cognitive functioning, suggesting the existence of distinct strategies used in such tasks. With LCA it became possible to classify post hoc. This important step forward in modeling and analyzing cognitive strategies is relevant to the overlapping waves model for…

Research on teachers' (personal) theories and beliefs and their (practical) knowledge derived from experience, whether held implicitly or stated explicitly as their personal practical theories (PPTs), indicates that such beliefs can influence teachers' classroom practices and, therefore, the opportunities that their students have for learning.…

This paper describes a four-dimensional model for the science of knowledge acquisition and a classification system in terms of these dimensions. A summary of the state of the art in terms of the cells generated in a four-dimensional representation of this classification system is presented. The need for better tools for conducting knowledge…

Models for cognitive diagnosis have been developed as an attempt to provide more than a single test score from item response data. Most approaches are based on a hypothesis that relates items to underlying skills. This relation takes the form of a design matrix that specifies for each cognitive item which skills are required to solve the item and…

This study was designed to determine whether concepts judged by participants as either prototypically social, non-social, animate, or inanimate would be cognitively structured in a manner consistent with E. Rosch's hierarchical model. During the first experiment, 168 undergraduates generated words to be placed in one of the prototypical categories…

This paper describes the development of a taxonomy of residential facilities for mentally retarded people based on program model, size, and operation. Data are presented on the use of the classification system in a national survey of 15,633 residential facilities for mentally retarded persons in the United States. Program models are defined…

The richness of the information available in cross-classification tables, compared to the information conveyed in the typical correlation coefficient, is emphasized in this paper. The kinds of information to be found in cross-classification tables are described, and several examples of the use of cross-classification patterns in research are…

Dissimilarity Linkage Analysis (DLA) is an extremely simple procedure for developing a typology from empirical attributes that permits the clustering of entities. First the procedure develops a taxonomy of types from empirical attributes possessed by entities in the sample. Second, the procedure assigns entities to one, and only one, type in the…

The problems of modeling a process as complex as reading are discussed, including such factors as the lack of agreement surrounding definitions of modeling, varying levels of rigor within and between models, the disjunctive categories within which models fall, and the difficulty of synthesis across fields which employ very different technical…

Four types of fundamental structures are briefly described and illustrated: the learning hierarchy, the procedural hierarchy, the taxonomy, and the model. Then a theoretical framework is presented for classifying types of subject matter content, and some implications of these content classifications are discussed. (VT)

Proposes that the development of document-retrieval systems can benefit from the incorporation of conceptual modeling techniques, specifically classification, aggregation, and generalization. An array model is presented which has been designed especially for document retrieval. (Author/EM)

An alternative approach to the traditional diagnostic-prescrptive or medical model for classifying behavior disorders is proposed which considers topography of deviant behaviors, degree of exceptionality, nature of deviance, and events influencing the deviancy in the context of developing and monitoring education/treatment programs. (Author/CB)