This study, through multilevel analyses of the data of four English-speaking nations (i.e., Canada, England, New Zealand and the United States) from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2001 database, investigated the relationship between teachers' uses of various types of classroom assessments and their fourth-graders'…

The school environment is an ideal setting for healthy weight programming with adolescents. The federal government has reinforced the importance of school-based health promotion. The current study examined the preliminary influence of the 2006 school wellness policy requirement of the "Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act"…

The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to understand how everyday cross-cultural interactions affected the adjustment of undergraduate international students attending a private research university in the northeastern United States. To fulfill this purpose, three research questions were formulated as a foundation for this investigation:…

Typically, achievement gaps between groups of students are measured as either differences in average scores or differences in proficiency rates. But, practitioners, policymakers, and researchers have long recognized that these approaches don't tell the whole story. Average scores, for example, are good at summarizing trends but can mask real…

This dissertation consists of four chapters. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the evolved concept of disability and an introduction of the support needs construct to special education and related disciplines, as well as a summary of studies that examined the support needs of people with intellectual disability. This Chapter also presents research…

This book is a welcome guide for educators, civic leaders, and researchers looking for ways to leverage data to identify the most effective policies, interventions, and use of resources for their communities. In the current era of reform, much has been made of the fact that there are many influences that shape children beyond the walls of the…

Anatomy A215: Basic Human Anatomy (Anat A215) is an undergraduate human anatomy course at Indiana University Bloomington (IUB) that serves as a requirement for many degree programs at IUB. The difficulty of the course, coupled with pressure to achieve grades for admittance into specific programs, has resulted in high remediation rates. In an…

The presence of outlying anchor items is an issue faced by many testing agencies. The decision to retain or remove an item is a difficult one, especially when the content representation of the anchor set becomes questionable by item removal decisions. Additionally, the reason for the aberrancy is not always clear, and if the performance of the…

Research has documented that many new entrants to the workforce from adult basic education (ABE) programs are critically lacking in the preparation and technology skills needed for workplace success. To address this problem, this basic interpretive qualitative study was implemented to examine and identify the basic technology skills perceived by…

Students often make errors when trying to solve qualitative or conceptual physics problems, and while many successful instructional interventions have been generated to prevent such errors, the process of deduction that students use when solving physics problems has not been thoroughly studied. In an effort to better understand that reasoning…

The purpose of this research is to consider the environmental knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, of adults in Minnesota, and possible factors that influence environmental literacy. Specifically, this study is designed to: (1) measure the environmental literacy of Minnesota adults, (2) explore possible relationships between Minnesota adults.…

This presentation focuses on an initial evaluation study of Math Recovery (MR), a pullout, one-to-one tutoring program that has been designed to increase mathematics achievement among low-performing first graders, thereby closing the school-entry achievement gap and enabling participants to achieve at the level of their higher-performing peers in…

Written in a refreshing conversational style, this text thoroughly prepares students, program administrators, and new evaluators to conduct evaluations or to use them in their work. The book's question-driven focus and clear discussions about the importance of fostering evaluation use by building collaborative relationships with stakeholders set…

When respondents fail to use response scales of survey questionnaires as intended, latent variable modeling of data can produce disordered category thresholds. The objective of this paper is to show the usefulness of the Rasch modeling features to explore different ways of collapsing categories so that they are properly ordered and fit for further…

Misconceptions of chemistry and chemical engineering university students concerning instrumental analysis have been established from coordinated tests, tutorial interviews and laboratory lessons. Misconceptions can be divided into: (1) formal, involving specific concepts and formulations within the general frame of chemistry; (2)…