For decades, studies have revealed students' decreasing interest in science. Extracurricular learning opportunities--the Science Olympiads being a publicly well-known example--are an important means identified to tackle this challenge and help students further differentiate their interests. Better understanding the underlying constructs and…

Recently, Nissen et al. argued in this journal for the use of Cohen's d, in place of the more commonly used normalized gain, in the analysis of preinstruction and postinstruction scores on concept inventories used to measure the effectiveness of instruction. Their reason for advocating such a change is that they say normalized gains are…

The Adapted Skillstreaming Checklist measures social/social-communication skills and behavioral flexibility/regulation of children with autism spectrum disorder without intellectual disability. Prior studies provided support for the reliability and criterion-related validity of the Adapted Skillstreaming Checklist total score for these children;…

Disengaged test taking tends to be most prevalent with low-stakes tests. This has led to questions about the validity of aggregated scores from large-scale international assessments such as PISA and TIMSS, as previous research has found a meaningful correlation between the mean engagement and mean performance of countries. The current study, using…

The authors translated the California Brief Multicultural Competence Scale (CBMCS; Gamst et al., 2004), a measure of multicultural competence, into Korean for cross-cultural validation. An exploratory factor analysis followed by a confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of Korean counselors (N = 365) supported a 3-factor model: Multicultural…

Listening is a fundamental skill in which students are required to gain adequate proficiency for their successful academic achievement. Since 2010, reports from a national exam have exhibiting a worrying trend in listening component where most of the candidates scored level 1 and 2 which indicating them as limited and very limited users. In view…

Service-learning as a transformative pedagogy has been adopted within Hong Kong's tertiary education sector for over a decade; however, the lack of a standardized and validated measurement instrument to assess its student learning outcomes has been an obstacle to its further development. The current research study, collaboratively conducted by…

The Regulations of the Commissioner of Education provide that an intermediate-level science test is to be administered in Grade 8 to serve as a basis for determining students' need for academic intervention services in science. The New York State Grade 8 Intermediate-Level Science Test consists of two required components: a Written Test and a…

The "2nd Annual WPI-UMASS-UPENN EDM Data Mining Challenge" required contestants to predict efficient testtaking based on log data. In this paper, we describe our theory-driven and psychometric modeling approach. For feature engineering, we employed the Log-Normal Response Time Model for estimating latent person speed, and the Generalized…

The aim of this dissertation was to develop and validate a scale to assess factors that interfere with veterans' successful transition from military life to the college environment. Student veterans are a unique population in the student body and often have unique challenges assimilating to the college environment, including difficulties making…

Little is known about whether a widely used mindfulness measure in adults--the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ)--is also reliable and valid in adolescents. The current study evaluated the psychometric properties of a 20-item short-form FFMQ in a sample of 599 high school students (M[subscript age] = 16.3 years; 49% female) living in the…

Little is known about whether a widely used mindfulness measure in adults--the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ)--is also reliable and valid in adolescents. The current study evaluated the psychometric properties of a 20-item short-form FFMQ in a sample of 599 high school students (M[subscript age] = 16.3 years; 49% female) living in the…

The response time-based concealed information test can reveal when a person recognizes a relevant item among other, irrelevant items, based on comparatively slower responding. Thereby, if a person is concealing the knowledge about the relevance of this item (e.g., recognizing it as a murder weapon), this deception can be revealed. A recent study,…

Diagnostic test accuracy (DTA) systematic reviews are conducted to summarize evidence on the accuracy of a diagnostic test including a critical evaluation of the primary studies. Where appropriate, the evidence is meta-analyzed to obtain pooled estimates of effectiveness. In this study, we reviewed and critiqued three DTA guidance documents with…

In many large testing programs, equipercentile equating has been widely used under a random groups design to adjust test difficulty between forms. However, one thorny issue occurs with equipercentile equating when a particular score has no observed frequency. The purpose of this study is to suggest and evaluate six potential methods in…