When 43 experienced school psychologists were asked to evaluate discrepancy scores, it was found that they made inconsistent choices, failed to use standard statistical procedures for testing differences between scores, and tended to misinterpret percentile ranks as useful for discrepancy analysis. Implications for learning-disabilities…

This study is intended to examine the influence of the democratic climate of classrooms on student engagement and learning outcomes in order to find out a more adequate model of learning in Civic Education classrooms. A model is developed for testing with data obtained from a sample of 930 students from schools in North Sulawesi. Prior to the…

The competencies of prospective consumer education teachers were measured, and student and demographic information variables related to achievement scores on the test were identified. Using the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) as the sampling frame, a mail survey elicited over 4,000 prospective teacher responses on…

A study was conducted in rural Maryland which utilized a 3-stage panel design with experimental and matched control groups. The questions to which answers were sought were: (1) What specific changes are achieved over time by nutrition aides visiting rural poor mothers in their homes? (2) Is there a point of diminishing returns with home visits?…

Two basic issues are discussed that involve the Carver model of the relationship between test score and knowledge. The first of these concerns different types of tests which have different probabilities of obtaining the correct answer due to guessing. A derivation is shown which places different test types "on-a-par"--meaning that two tests are…

This paper describes an exercise that frames the choices made in creating measures of knowledge as problematic--making clear that the difficulties in interpreting the survey response are not limited to opinion items but apply to questions about factual information as well. Ambiguities in question wording and response options can invite multiple…

The objective of the current study was to assess the effects of mandatory child abuse training on the knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward abused children and abusive parents among a sample of police recruits. An experimental pretest-posttest design was used in which 81 participants were randomly assigned to experimental conditions and 101 to…

The Knowledge about Attention Deficit Disorder Questionnaire (KADD-Q) was administered to 256 teachers and 92 parents. Statistical analysis revealed the KADD-Q to be an internally consistent measure of teachers' and parents' knowledge of ADHD. Findings demonstrated that the levels of teachers' and parents' knowledge about the causes of ADHD was…

Data on some aspects of the deductive logical competence of nongraduate teachers in the English-speaking Caribbean, primarily Jamaica, are reported in this document. The teachers sampled were those who sat for entrance examinations for the University of the West Indies (Mona) Faculty of Education Bachelor of Education and Certificate of Education…

Extensive statistical analyses were made of annual achievement progress on North Carolina's Department of Public Instruction tests. The data included 1,592 students in six Core Knowledge schools and 533,919 students in more than 1,300 other schools. The analyses showed that Core Knowledge schools excelled the other schools in achievement progress…

Educational assessment concerns inference about student knowledge, skills, and accomplishments. Test theory has evolved in part to address questions of weight, coverage, and import of data. Resulting concepts and techniques can be viewed as applications of more general principles for inference in the presence of uncertainty. (SLD)

The main objective of this study was to identify prospective science teachers' conceptions on basic astronomical phenomena. A questionnaire consisting of nine open-ended questions was administered to 327 prospective science teachers. The questionnaire was constructed after extensive review of the literature and took into consideration the reported…

Working from data originally collected by Kropp and Stoker (ED 010 044) on the validity of Bloom's taxonomy, this paper attempts to demonstrate that a multiplicity of analytic methods leads to a clearer conception of causal relationships than any single method. (Author/MH)

The purpose of this study was to determine if factors to predict success in college biology (i.e., prior knowledge of biology or reasoning ability) depend on the instructional method employed (i.e., expository or inquiry). Reasoning ability was found to account for a significant amount of variance in final examination scores, regardless of…

Illustrates how graphing calculators can be used to address the knowledge and skills promoted by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and other educational organizations. Focuses on plotting capability and facilitating various types of data and information analysis. (CMK)