The aim of the study is to investigate the measurement invariance of mathematics self-concept and self-efficacy across 40 countries that participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2003 and 2012 cycles. The sample of the study consists of 271,760 students in PISA 2003 and 333,804 students in PISA 2012. Firstly, the…

Background: Physical activity (PA) is considered an important factor affecting academic achievement (AA). Different intensities of PA affect mental engagement (ME), which, in turn, affects AA. However, the role of ME in the relationship between PA and AA remains unclear. Objective: This study aimed to examine the mediating and/or moderating role…

Little evidence is available regarding the differential impact of reading versus reading and writing on multiple source comprehension. The present study aims to: (1) compare the inferential comprehension performance of students in reading versus reading/synthesis conditions; (2) explore the impact of performing the tasks on paper versus on screen…

Surveys with rating scales are often used in higher education research to measure student learning and development, yet testing and reporting on the longitudinal psychometric properties of these instruments is rare. Rasch techniques allow scholars to map item difficulty and individual aptitude on the same linear, continuous scale to compare…

Background: Receiving timely health screening is associated with important public health benefits among older adults. By focusing on the role of social relationships, the present study was aimed at examining longitudinal trajectories of health screening use among older adults in Korea, whose universal health care system provides free-of-charge…

Fluency confound (FC) has been a widely studied issue in divergent thinking (DT) tasks. In this study, the impact of DT task structure on FC was examined by focusing on activity level data from Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT)-Figural. The TTCT-Figural involves two different task structures. Prompts in Activities 1 and 2 are designed for…

This study developed an Adolescents' Uncertainty Scale (AUS), with the aim of understanding individual differences in uncertainty among adolescents. In the pretest phase, 507 ninth-grade students were recruited. After exploratory factor analyses, a 25-item AUS with four dimensions--irresoluteness, instability, lack of self-knowledge, and…

Cognitive diagnosis models (CDMs) are the statistical framework for cognitive diagnostic assessment in education and psychology. They generally assume that subjects' latent attributes are dichotomous--mastery or nonmastery, which seems quite deterministic. As an alternative to dichotomous attribute mastery, attention is drawn to the use of a…

Background: Silent aspiration (SA) is common post-stroke and associated with increased risk of pneumonia, length of stay and healthcare costs. Clinical swallow examinations (CSEs) are unreliable measures of SA. There is no consensus on the clinical components that best detect SA. Cough reflex testing (CRT) is an alternative/adjunct whose SA…

This study examines the perceptions of teachers and school leaders from high performing, socially disadvantaged government schools about the value of Australia's national standardised test regime for informing learning and teaching. While many studies report negative experiences and perceptions of standardised testing, few studies have explicitly…

Assessment policy in England is often of public significance. Assessments, especially GCSEs, A levels and their vocational equivalents, have significant stakes for candidates and wider society (including for school accountability and for selection to higher education). Such assessments are frequently critiqued. There has been little major…

COVID-19 has occasioned ongoing shifts in discourse as language changes to reflect and shape new stages of the global pandemic and different voices weigh in on topics, such as infectious diseases and vaccine efficacy. This study looks at an instance of this that relates to the 'global education industry', where cancellation of the International…

To model behavioral and neural correlates of language comprehension in naturalistic environments, researchers have turned to broad-coverage tools from natural-language processing and machine learning. Where syntactic structure is explicitly modeled, prior work has relied predominantly on context-free grammars (CFGs), yet such formalisms are not…

Second language implicit learning research has shown that a variety of linguistic features can be acquired without awareness. However, this research overwhelmingly uses comprehension tests to measure implicit learning. It remains unclear whether newly acquired implicit knowledge can also be recruited for production. To address this question, we…

States have key roles and responsibilities in protecting and promoting the health of all of school-age youth. Though assessment and planning instruments exist to support quality school nursing service delivery at individual school building, community, and district levels, no comparable measure was available to assess state-level support for the…