Policymakers and school administrators have embraced value-added models of teacher effectiveness as tools for educational improvement. Teacher value-added estimates may be viewed as complicated scores of a certain kind. This suggests using a test validation model to examine their reliability and validity. Validation begins with an interpretive…

Researchers are strongly encouraged to accompany the results of statistical tests with appropriate estimates of effect size. For 2-group comparisons, a probability-based effect size estimator ("A") has many appealing properties (e.g., it is easy to understand, robust to violations of parametric assumptions, insensitive to outliers). We review…

Research indicates that Americans believe instructor political bias to be a serious problem in the college classroom, as many professors are considered a liberal elite. In light of scholarship suggesting that characteristics students bring with them to the classroom may influence their perception of instructor communication behaviors, the present…

The transactional cognitive vulnerability to stress model Hankin & Abramson ('Psychological Bulletin," 127:773-796, 2001) extends the traditional diathesis-stress model by proposing that the relationships among cognitions, depressive symptoms, and stressors are dynamic and bidirectional. In this study three different pathways among these variables…

There have been a number of calls for a 'dialogue' between neuroscience and education. However, 'dialogue' implies an equal conversation between partners. The outcome of collaboration between neuroscientists and educators not normally expected to be so balanced. Educationists are expected to learn from neuroscience how to conduct research with…

Children hold the belief that social categories have essences. We investigated what kinds of properties children feel licensed to infer about a person based on social category membership. Seventy-two 4-6-year-olds were introduced to novel social categories defined as having one internal--psychological or biological--and one external--behavioral or…

Argumentation can contribute significantly to content area learning. Recent research has raised questions about the effects of discussion (deliberation) goals versus persuasion (disputation) goals on reasoning and learning. This is the first study to compare the effects of these writing goals on individual writing to learn. Grade 7 and 8 students…

Reading comprehension is an essential academic skill (Nash & Snowling, 2006;National Reading Panel, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).Yet, among students in the eighth grade, approximately 64% of all students and 91% of students with disabilities do not read at proficient levels (National Center for Education…

Early Childhood Education as a subject in primary schools in Nigeria was first noticed among the private primary schools in the 80s while the public primary schools did not incorporate it in their curriculum in Nigeria. Of recent, some state governments in Nigeria have just adopted and organized early childhood education unit into their primary…

Those who work in second- and foreign-language testing often find Koretz's concern for validity inferences under high-stakes (VIHS) conditions both welcome and familiar. While the focus of the article is more narrowly on the potential for two instructional responses to test-based accountability, "reallocation" and "coaching,"…

The objective of this study was to evaluate the performance of students of college of Science of Sultan Qaboos University (SQU) in Calculus I course, and examine the predictive validity of student's high school performance and gender for Calculus I success. The data for the study was extracted from students' database maintained by the Deanship of…

Building upon the work of Zieffler, Garfield, DelMas and Reading (2008) and others, we developed a framework for assessing informal inferential tasks in middle school mathematics textbooks. The framework both embodies the key recommendations for developing informal inferential reasoning and captures common trimming attributes, which lower the…

This study aimed to examine the relationship between certain factors of online learning readiness and learners' end-of-course achievements. The study was conducted at a two-year post-secondary Turkish military school within the scope of the course titled Computer Literacy, which was designed and implemented in a blended way. The data were…

A few computer-assisted language learning (CALL) instruments have been developed in Iran to measure EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' attitude toward CALL. However, these instruments have no solid validity argument and accordingly would be unable to provide a reliable measurement of attitude. The present study aimed to develop a CALL…

How can technologies and digital learning experiences be used to support underserved, under-resourced, and underprepared students? For many years, educators, researchers, and policy makers looking for strategies to close the achievement gap and improve student learning have sought solutions involving new uses of technology, especially for students…