Background: Existing research suggests that one of the challenges for teachers in persisting with innovative inquiry curricula is their difficulty scaffolding students' transitions into technology-supported and open-ended activities. The question of whether students can effectively scaffold one another's transitions has not been previously…

Leadership is a social process that brings together the interests of multiple stakeholders for mutual benefit toward the common good (Burns, 1978; Rost, 1993). In an effort to engage individuals to understand the complexities of the leadership and public policy making processes the authors developed a simulation-debate exercise designed to target…

Recent changes in the structure of initial teacher education have resulted in teacher training institutions having to think again about how they address the issue of inclusion within their provision. In this article, Sue Pearson, who co-ordinates the MA (SEN) programme in the School of Education at the University of Leeds, and who contributes to…

Several teachers from State College (Pennsylvania) Area School District became intrigued with helping their students better understand the science associated with a unit on air and aviation. In particular, they observed that students often encountered difficulty with abstract flight concepts, such as lift, thrust, and drag. Content issues became…

This study describes the usefulness of a simulation, MARRIAGE AND FAMILY, in helping newly arrived international students adjust to the academic demands of university life. It outlines various phases of the simulation. The narrative regarding its implementation in the classroom demonstrates how well many international students adapt to the value…

A multiple choice test item is identified as flawed if it has no single best answer. In spite of extensive quality control procedures, the administration of flawed items to test-takers is inevitable. Common strategies for dealing with flawed items in conventional testing, grounded in the principle of fairness to test-takers, are reexamined in the…

This document contains the materials required to play a gaming simulation titled "Night Rehearsal" that is designed to familiarize both nontraditional college students and college personnel with some of the challenges facing nontraditional students entering college. Presented first are a brief discussion of some of the barriers typically…

The interest in the application of large-scale computerized adaptive testing has served to focus attention on issues that arise when theoretical advances are made operational. Some of these issues stem less from changes in testing conditions and more from changes in testing paradigms. One such issue is that of the order in which questions are…

While senior administrators in all educational institutions have highly complex positions and are very expensive to train and replace, human resources departments have always been challenged to find competent administrators that fit well into the organization. Four main variables in the selection process are: the organization's self-awareness of…

Processes involved in the acquisition of cognitive skills were studied through an investigation of the efficacy of initially encoding knowledge of a cognitive skill in either declarative or procedural form. Subjects were 80 university students. The cognitive skill, learning the steps to program a simulated video cassette recorder (VCR), was taught…

General and specific information is offered on integrating community policing and other management philosophies into an organization's selection and promotional testing systems. The concept of community policing is not necessarily a new one for many police organizations, but integrating it fully requires bringing internal support structures into…

Two-stage and multistage test designs provide a way of roughly adapting item difficulty to test-taker ability. All test takers take a parallel stage-one test, and, based on their scores, they are routed to tests of different difficulty levels in subsequent stages. These designs provide some of the benefits of standard computerized adaptive testing…

The concept of "washback," especially prominent in the field of applied linguistics, refers to the extent to which a test influences teachers and learners to do things they would not otherwise necessarily do. Some writers invoke the notion of washback validity, holding that a test's validity should be gauged by the degree to which it has…

This paper explores the impact that the evaluation industry has had on the development and implementation of social policy and programs, primarily as carried out by the U.S. Departments of Labor and Health and Human Services. In addition, major tools evaluators have developed and used, and the institutional arrangements through which they have…

Earth science education needs to be relevant to students in order to make them aware of the serious problems facing the planet. In an effort to insure that this need is meet, the Denver Earth Science Project has set as one of their goals the development of new earth science curriculum materials for teachers. This document provides a collection of…