In this commentary, University of North Carolina's associate dean of research and assessment at the School of Education Terry Ackerman poses questions and shares his thoughts on David Thissen's essay, "Bad Questions: An Essay Involving Item Response Theory" (this issue). Ackerman begins by considering the two purposes of Item Response…

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a massive impact on education systems in the U.S, prompting a variety of changes to school learning environments. This study investigates student/family choices of learning modality in one large school district in the U.S and examines how these choices differ by students' race/ethnicity and performance level. Results…

Background: As COVID-19 has spread around the world, "how and where students learn" has dramatically changed. Approximately 90% of the U.S schools shifted into virtual learning in April 2020. For the 2020-2021 school year, school districts in the U.S were given the autonomy to decide how they would educate their students. While many…

As the discussant of this special issue, I focus on two related ideas: choice and self-interest. First, I explore the idea of choice and its relevance within research that concerns itself with a heavily loaded concept like "social justice". My proposal here is that future scholarship that explores the consequences of privatised health…

Purpose: This study aims to reveal effects of content balancing and item selection method on ability estimation in computerized adaptive tests by comparing Fisher's maximum information (FMI) and likelihood weighted information (LWI) methods. Research Methods: Four groups of examinees (250, 500, 750, 1000) and a bank of 500 items with 10 different…

Purpose: This study assessed the quality of participation in farmer learning video (FLV) production by examining opportunities for actors' participation and the extent of incorporation of their interests. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative case study research design was used through focus group discussions and interviews held with 5 key…

Self-assessment and task-selection skills are crucial in self-regulated learning situations in which students can choose their own tasks. Prior research suggested that training with video modeling examples, in which another person (the model) demonstrates and explains the cyclical process of problem-solving task performance, self-assessment, and…

Feature selection is one of the most important decisions made by product managers. This three article study investigates the concepts, tools and techniques for making trade-off decisions of introducing new features in evolving Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software products. The first article investigates the efficacy of various feature…

To explain the inequalities in access to a discrete good G across two populations, or across time in a single national context, it is necessary to distinguish, for each population or period of time, the effect of the diffusion of G from that of unequal outcomes of underlying micro-social processes. The inequality of outcomes of these micro-social…

Since the first publication by Glaser and Strauss in 1967, Grounded Theory has become a highly influential research approach in the social sciences. The approach provides techniques and coding strategies for building theory inductively from the "ground up" as concepts within the data earn relevance into an evolving substantive theory.…

Human and automated tutors attempt to choose pedagogical activities that will maximize student learning, informed by their estimates of the student's current knowledge. There has been substantial research on tracking and modeling student learning, but significantly less attention on how to plan teaching actions and how the assumed student model…

The current study compared the differential effects of choice and no-choice reinforcement conditions on skill acquisition. In addition, we assessed preference for choice-making opportunities with 3 children with autism, using a modified concurrent-chains procedure. We replicated the experiment with 2 participants. The results indicated that…

We explored a series of feature selection methods for model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL). More specifically, we explored four common correlation metrics and based on them, we proposed the fifth one named Weighed Information Gain (WIG). While much existing correlation-based feature selection methods mostly explored high correlation by default,…

This case study examines one African American adolescent male's digital choices and experiences during the creation of a digital story about Minecraft. This study introduces digital participatory choice cultures as a framework to consider how he might recognize and use existing meaning-making and composition strategies to bridge what young people…

We report on five experiments investigating response choices and response times to simple science questions that evoke student "misconceptions," and we construct a simple model to explain the patterns of response choices. Physics students were asked to compare a physical quantity represented by the slope, such as speed, on simple physics…