This study compared the perception of self-competence of immigrant Asian-American, Asian-Indian, Hispanic, native European-American, and African-American preschoolers. Self-competence is defined by Harter as the "feeling of confidence in achieving certain tasks." The development of self-competence emerges gradually as children acquire greater…

The phonologically transparent Persian orthography is normally transcribed with two distinct spellings; words spelled with vowels (letters) transcribed as a fixed part of the spelling (transparent) and words spelled with vowels (diacritics) omitted (opaque). Three groups of Persian readers, namely developmental dyslexics (n = 29, mean age = 9.4,…

To explore the impact of the communication medium on building common ground, this article presents research comparing learner use of reception strategies in traditional face-to-face (FTF) and in synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC). Reception strategies, such as reprises, hypothesis testing and forward inferencing provide evidence of…

The results of previous educational research raise some questions about the efficacy of conventional teaching strategies and point to a need for using teaching strategies that explicitly take into account misconceptions students bring to the classes or acquire during the teaching-learning process. Accordingly, this article presents efforts to…

Purpose: Recent research suggests that nonword repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks can be used to discriminate between children with SLI and their typically developing age-matched (TDAM) and younger (TDY) peers. Method: Fourteen Cantonese-speaking children with SLI and 30 of their TDAM and TDY peers were compared on NWR and SR…

Literature suggests that developing a community of learners is the key to a successful online-learning experience. In this study, the instructor of a multimedia authoring course adopted a synchronous communication tool (Yahoo Messenger) to interact with learners orally on a weekly basis and, thereby, to establish a sense among the learners that…

As online professional development courses for teachers have grown, the discussion forum has become a locus of considerable research. This study analyzes the discussion forums in four different sessions of a short (4-week) online course for teachers from six schools in three states. This study also compares four methodologies, all of which have a…

The usefulness of a "lexical universe" in the development of verbal reasoning tests was studied. The lexical universe, which is a comprehensive listing of words and their frequencies based on a collection of machine-readable texts exceeding 14 million words of running text, is an outcome of a 1987 College Board study of the language in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the vocational interests and personality patterns of today's academic librarians are more like the traditional stereotype (i.e., that librarians are conventional, conservative, rigid types) or are beginning to change due to the changing nature of the profession and its work environment. To…

A study used four statistical item bias analysis strategies to determine the French cross-cultural validity of the Maine Educational Assessment, a standardized test administered in six content areas to students in grades 4, 8, and 11. Analysis was performed on eighth grade pupil performance in test year 1988-89, in the areas of the 100 common…

This report is a description of the findings related to 5-year graduation rates of student athletes who entered National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I institutions in the fall semester of either 1984 or 1985. The study is based on data collected in the NCAA Study of Academic Performance of Student Athletes. Overall graduations…

In 1987, Rockland Community College (RCC) established a Developmental Studies Department to serve students in need of remedial/developmental services. This report describes the services of the department and two special related projects. Part I focuses on the Developmental Studies Department, covering assessment, placement, and advisement; college…

Determining gender learning-style preferences is necessary in assuring that principal preparation programmes are inclusive of styles that benefit both males and females. The purpose of this study was to determine if there were any gender differences for students in a principal preparation programme on responses to items measuring pedagogy (science…

Assessing fit of psychometric models has always been an issue of enormous interest, but there exists no unanimously agreed upon item fit diagnostic for the models. Bayesian networks, frequently used in educational assessments (see, for example, Mislevy, Almond, Yan, & Steinberg, 2001) primarily for learning about students' knowledge and…

This paper presents an introduction to the use of latent trait models for the estimation of domain scores. It was shown that these models provided an advantage over classical test theory and binomial error models in that unbiased estimates of true domain scores could be obtained even when items were not randomly selected from a universe of items.…