Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has profoundly reshaped how graduate students conceptualise, design and conduct academic research in higher education. While current metrics predominantly focus on technology acceptance and usage patterns, they often neglect the diverse cognitive engagements in graduate students' integration of GenAI…

American Educational Research Association (AERA) standards stipulate that researchers show evidence of the internal structure of instruments. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) is one structural equation modeling procedure designed to assess construct validity of assessments that has broad applicability for counselors interested in instrument…

In Gargani and Strong (2014), we describe The Rapid Assessment of Teacher Effectiveness (RATE), a new teacher evaluation instrument. Our account of the validation research associated with RATE inspired a review by Good and Lavigne (2015). Here, we reply to the main points of their review. We elaborate on the validity, reliability, theoretical…

The growing importance of genomics and bioinformatics methods and paradigms in biology has been accompanied by an explosion of new curricula and pedagogies. An important question to ask about these educational innovations is whether they are having a meaningful impact on students' knowledge, attitudes, or skills. Although assessments are…

The Measure of Acceptance of the Theory of Evolution (MATE) was constructed to be a single-factor instrument that assesses an individual's overall acceptance of evolutionary theory. The MATE was validated and the scores resulting from the MATE were found to be reliable for the population of inservice high school biology teachers. However, many…

Standardizing aspects of assessments has long been recognized as a tactic to help make evaluations of examinees fair. It reduces variation in irrelevant aspects of testing procedures that could advantage some examinees and disadvantage others. However, recent attention to making assessment accessible to a more diverse population of students…

Extended time is one of the most common testing accommodations provided to students with disabilities. It is also controversial; critics of extended time accommodations argue that extended time is used too readily, without concern for how it changes the skills measured by tests, leading to scores that cannot be compared fairly with those of other…

Research supports the connection between engagement, achievement, and school behavior across levels of economic and social advantage and disadvantage. Despite increasing interest and scientific findings, a number of interrelated conceptual and methodological issues must be addressed to advance this construct, particularly for designing…

With increasing reliance being placed on the results of their surveys, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) recognized a need for these survey results to be valid and reliable. As part of the work of the Statistical Analysis Group in Education (SAGE), an effort was undertaken to investigate validity and reliability in survey…