A variety of developments in nursing education in Australia including some innovative and exciting models, educational enterprises between education and industry, and evidence of developing strengths in research and professional alliances on a national level have been discussed recently. This paper presents Simulation to Practice as an example of…

Web-based education and training provides a new paradigm for imparting knowledge; students can access the learning material anytime by operating remotely from any location. Web3D open standards, such as X3D and VRML, support Web-based delivery of Educational Virtual Environments (EVEs). EVEs have a great potential for learning and training…

The present study evaluated the effects of both a traditional lecture and the conservative dual-criterion (CDC) judgment aid on the ability of 6 university students to visually inspect AB-design line graphs. The traditional lecture reliably failed to improve visual inspection accuracy, whereas the CDC method substantially improved the performance…

Policies governing divorce and parenting, such as child support orders and enforcement, child custody regulations, and marital dissolution requirements, can have a large impact on the welfare of parents and children. Recent research has produced evidence on the responses of divorce rates to unilateral divorce laws and child support enforcement. In…

This brochure contains an engineering activity for upper elementary, middle school, and high school students that examines the transportation of radioactive waste. The activity is designed to inform students about the existence of radioactive waste and its transportation to disposal sites. Students experiment with methods to contain the waste and…

The purpose of this Item Response Theory study was to investigate how the expected reduction in item information, due to the collapsing of response categories in performance assessment data, was affected by varying testing conditions: item difficulty, item discrimination, inter-rater reliability, and direction of collapsing. The investigation used…

The main goal of this study was to assess how sensitive unidimensional parameter estimates derived from BILOG were when the unidimensionality assumption was violated and the underlying ability distribution was not multivariate normal. A multidimensional three-parameter logistic distribution that was a straightforward generalization of the…

An instructional strategy, designed for any basic semester speech and/or communication course, helps students improve their informational interviewing skills. For the strategy to work smoothly, the following conditions should be met: an introductory required speech communication course; a predetermined and uniformly used amount of course content…

When running out of time on a multiple-choice test, some examinees are likely to respond rapidly to the remaining unanswered items in an attempt to get some items right by chance. Because these responses will tend to be incorrect, the presence of "rapid-guessing behavior" could cause these items to appear to be more difficult than they…

A 1-year study determined what students were doing as they engaged in the Chelsea Bank computer software simulation activities. The major goal of the analysis was to build a knowledge base for the development of assessments that would guide instruction and focus teachers and students (in middle-level and high school classrooms) as they used the…

This study investigates parameter estimation under the simple linear regression model for situations in which the underlying assumptions of ordinary least squares estimation are untenable. Classical nonparametric estimation methods are directly compared against some robust estimation methods for conditions in which varying degrees of outliers are…

Courtroom scenes in literature seem to have a special magic with students (probably because of all the trials seen on television, fiction or non-fiction). Students in a composition and literature course at the University of Nebraska, after reading Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," wrote "closing arguments" for either…

This paper describes the "Sickle Cell Counselor" (SCC), a goal based scenario on permanent display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. SCC is an exploratory hypermedia simulation program which provides users with a basic understanding of Sickle Cell Anemia. The user of the program plays the role of a genetic counselor, and,…

A method is presented for the simultaneous analysis of differential item functioning (DIF) in multi-factor situations. The method is unique in that it combines item response theory (IRT) and analysis of variance (ANOVA), takes a simultaneous approach to multifactor DIF analysis, and is capable of capturing interaction and controlling for possible…

Many educators in facilitative roles have approached the subject of visual disabilities by constructing activities designed to simulate blindness, using a blindfold or similar device. Participants are subsequently encouraged to perform rudimentary tasks such as eating a meal or moving about with a sighted companion as a guide. Frequently,…