This article reviews theoretical and research evidence to support the explicit and systematic teaching of five comprehension strategies that will help all students tackle expository texts with success. The article explains the "High 5!" strategies and how to teach them. An example of a lesson is included to show how the five strategies connect…

Evidence-centered assessment design (ECD) explicates a transparent evidentiary argument to warrant the inferences we make from student test performance. This article describes how the vehicles for gathering student evidence--task models and test specifications--are developed. Task models, which are the basis for item development, flow directly…

This paper proposes an argument framework for the teaching of null hypothesis statistical testing and its application in support of research. Elements of the Toulmin (1958) model of argument are used to illustrate the use of p values and Type I and Type II error rates in support of claims about statistical parameters and subject matter research…

The aim of the current study is to validate the invariance of major profile patterns derived from multidimensional scaling (MDS) by bootstrapping. Profile Analysis via Multidimensional Scaling (PAMS) was employed to obtain profiles and bootstrapping was used to construct the sampling distributions of the profile coordinates and the empirical…

Throughout this monograph, there has been frequent reference to levels of risk, inference of causation, testing for mediating variables, and the need to consider possible moderating influences. In this chapter, the authors review what is meant by these concepts, and then seek to pull together the findings from the English and Romanian Adoptee…

While there is consensus that conceptual change is surprisingly difficult, many competing theories of conceptual change co-exist in the literature. This dissertation argues that this discord is partly the result of an inadequate account of the unwritten rules of human social interaction that underlie the field's preferred…

Natural language poses several challenges to developing computational systems for modeling it. Natural language is not a precise problem but is rather ridden with a number of uncertainties in the form of either alternate words or interpretations. Furthermore, natural language is a generative system where the problem size is potentially infinite.…

While autism is one of the most intensively researched psychiatric disorders, little is known about reasoning skills of people with autism. The focus of this study was on defeasible inferences, that is inferences that can be revised in the light of new information. We used a behavioral task to investigate (a) conditional reasoning and (b) the…

Theories of probabilistic cognition postulate that internal representations are made up of multiple simultaneously held hypotheses, each with its own probability of being correct (henceforth, "probability distributions"). However, subjects make discrete responses and report the phenomenal contents of their mind to be all-or-none states rather than…

Relative weight analysis is a procedure for estimating the relative importance of correlated predictors in a regression equation. Because the sampling distribution of relative weights is unknown, researchers using relative weight analysis are unable to make judgments regarding the statistical significance of the relative weights. J. W. Johnson…

The authors examined cue competition effects in young children using the blicket detector paradigm, in which objects are placed either singly or in pairs on a novel machine and children must judge which objects have the causal power to make the machine work. Cue competition effects were found in a 5- to 6-year-old group but not in a 4-year-old…

Teachers of languages, as well as educators in general and employers, increasingly recognise the importance of developing intercultural capability. This recognition, however, brings the question of how this is evidenced as an outcome of learning. The assessment of this capability poses a range of theoretical and practical challenges. I begin with…

The present study applied a preferential looking paradigm to test whether 6- and 9-month old infants are able to infer the size of a goal object from an actor's grasping movement. The target object was a cup with the handle rotated either towards or away from the actor. In two experiments, infants saw the video of an actor's grasping movement…

Educators in large-enrollment courses are faced with the challenge of effectively disseminating information to their students to ensure that they learn the content provided. A related issue involves the means by which instructors evaluate student performance. Offering effective forms of performance feedback may be one technique to provide students…

This review summarizes studies involving pragmatic language comprehension and inference abilities in individuals with Asperger syndrome or high-functioning autism. Systematic searches of three electronic databases, selected journals, and reference lists identified 20 studies meeting the inclusion criteria. These studies were evaluated in terms of:…