Three methods of detecting item drift were compared: the procedure in BILOG-MG for estimating linear trends in item difficulty, the CUSUM procedure that Veerkamp and Glas (2000) used to detect trends in difficulty or discrimination, and a modification of Kim, Cohen, and Park's (1995) x 2 test for multiple-group differential item functioning (DIF),…

The four reactions in the May 2005 issue of "The Counseling Psychologist" address several considerations regarding the use of structural equation modeling (SEM) in counseling psychology research, including its appropriateness for analyzing one's data and testing one versus multiple theoretical models. In addition, points that are not mentioned in…

Purpose: This study assessed the psychometric properties of instruments used to measure constructs similar to stuttering-specific health-related quality of life. In the stuttering literature, most such instruments were originally intended to measure speakers' attitudes about, or reactions to, their stuttering. Method: Seventeen instruments were…

Interest development is not an easily studied process. There are at least 4 methods for examining the process of stability and change over time: relative stability, absolute stability, profile stability, and structural stability. A program of research that focuses on examining these 4 types of stability is summarized relative to the issues…

In meta-analysis, it is common to have dependent effect sizes, such as several effect sizes from the same sample but measured at different times. Cheung and Chan proposed the adjusted-individual and adjusted-weighted procedures to estimate the degree of dependence and incorporate this estimate in the meta-analysis. The present study extends the…

Group projects form a large and possibly growing component of the work undertaken for assessing students for postgraduate degrees in business. Yet the assessments sources, methods and purposes result in an array of combinations that the literature on assessment fails to capture in its full complexity. This paper builds on a new framework for…

The Subjective Happiness Scale (Lyubomirsky and Lepper, "Social Indicators Research," 46, 137-155, 1999) is a brief measure for assessing subjective happiness. The reliability and validity of the Malay version of the Subjective Happiness Scale was investigated in a community sample of 290 Chinese and 227 Malays in Malaysia. Results…

This report provides a brief summary of the research projects that have been conducted to support the development of the new SAT.

In an Angoff standard setting procedure, judges estimate the probability that a hypothetical randomly selected minimally competent candidate will answer correctly each item in the test. In many cases, these item performance estimates are made twice, with information shared with the panelists between estimates. Especially for long tests, this…

The science of education has focused on alternative educational approaches for years with a view to meeting the needs of wide student audiences in classes. One of the sources of the differences in learning performance at class environment is the learning styles. This study has been conducted to develop a learning styles scale for students at the…

In cross-cultural child development research there is often a need to translate instruments and instructions to languages other than English. Typically, the translation process focuses on ensuring linguistic equivalence. However, establishment of linguistic equivalence through translation techniques is often not sufficient to guard against…

Online professional development is multidimensional. It encompasses: a) an online, web-based format; b) professional development; and most likely c) specific objectives tailored to and created for the respective online professional development course. Evaluating online professional development is therefore also multidimensional and as such both…

The purpose of this study was to develop general outcome measures (GOM) in mathematics so that teachers could focus their instruction on needed prerequisite skills. We describe in detail, the manner in which content-related evidence was established and then present a number of statistical analyses conducted to evaluate the technical adequacy of…

This study investigated the usefulness of the many-facet Rasch model (MFRM) in evaluating the quality of performance related to PowerPoint presentations in higher education. The Rasch Model utilizes item response theory stating that the probability of a correct response to a test item/task depends largely on a single parameter, the ability of the…

Student ratings of teaching effectiveness are widely used to make judgments of faculty teaching performance. Research, however, has found that such ratings may not be accurate indicators of teaching performance because they are contaminated by course easiness. Using student ratings of 9855 professors employed at 79 different colleges and…