At-risk students are a part of the educational population of school aged students whose goals are to graduate upon completion of all required coursework in an educational institution. In the beginning, there were only brick-and-mortar schools before the 21st century primarily until virtual and/or online schools came into existence in the late…

The purpose of this study is to explore the potential impact of support materials on student spreadsheet skill acquisition. Specifically, this study examines the use of an online spreadsheet simulation tool versus a printed book across two independent student groups. This study hypothesizes that the online spreadsheet simulation tool will have a…

There has been a steady increase in the use of mixed-format tests, that is, tests consisting of both multiple-choice items and constructed-response items in both classroom and large-scale assessments. This calls for appropriate equating methods for such tests. As Item Response Theory (IRT) has rapidly become mainstream as the theoretical basis for…

Patient identification (ID) errors occurring during the medication administration process can be fatal. The aim of this study is to determine whether differences in nurses' behaviors and visual scanning patterns during the medication administration process influence their capacities to identify patient ID errors. Nurse participants (n = 20)…

Literacy remains an area of concern in early secondary education in Scotland (ages 12-14), with recent research suggesting a continued decline in attainment levels. As literacy underpins learning, interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches to teaching literacy are now being emphasized through the new Curriculum for Excellence that aims to…

Fluctuation electron microscopy (FEM) has been used to study the nanoscale order in various amorphous materials. The method is explicitly sensitive to 3- and 4-body atomic correlation functions in amorphous materials; this is sufficient to establish the existence of structural order on the nanoscale, even when the radial distribution function…

In this paper we examine ideas around Baudrillard's work on reality being a simulation, applying these ideas to educational research. We suggest that even rigorously devised quantitative forms of research, and the empirical data that such research produces, produce rather than simply report on reality; and that very often such research is…

Holland and colleagues derived a formula for analytical standard error of equating using the delta-method for the kernel equating method. Extending their derivation, this article derives an analytical standard error of equating procedure for the conventional percentile rank-based equipercentile equating with log-linear smoothing. This procedure is…

Local influence analysis is an important statistical method for studying the sensitivity of a proposed model to model inputs. One of its important issues is related to the appropriate choice of a perturbation vector. In this paper, we develop a general method to select an appropriate perturbation vector and a second-order local influence measure…

This study examines the impact that experienced mentoring has on business decisions in a higher education business school. Students, arranged in teams, were given the opportunity to operate virtual companies in a well-known, business simulation program called Capsim. They were required to make decisions concerning marketing, production, finance,…

This document describes a solution to a problem in the automatic content scoring of the multilingual character-by-character highlighting item type. This solution is language independent and represents a significant enhancement. This solution not only facilitates automatic scoring but plays an important role in clustering students' responses;…

A study design has been developed that employs a dual modeling approach to identify factors associated with facility-level cancer screening improvement and how this is mediated by the use of clinical decision support. This dual modeling approach combines principles of (1) Health Informatics, (2) Cancer Prevention and Control, (3) Health Services…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the most appropriate item response theory (IRT) measurement model for aphasia tests requiring 2-choice responses and to determine whether small samples are adequate for estimating such models. Method: Pyramids and Palm Trees (Howard & Patterson, 1992) test data that had been collected from…

Doubly bounded continuous data are common in the social and behavioral sciences. Examples include judged probabilities, confidence ratings, derived proportions such as percent time on task, and bounded scale scores. Dependent variables of this kind are often difficult to analyze using normal theory models because their distributions may be quite…

Secondary respondent data are underutilized because researchers avoid using these data in the presence of substantial missing data. The authors reviewed, evaluated, and tested solutions to this problem. Five strategies of dealing with missing partner data were reviewed: (a) complete case analysis, (b) inverse probability weighting, (c) correction…