Developing critical-thinking and scientific reasoning skills are core learning objectives of science education, but little empirical evidence exists regarding the interrelationships between these constructs. Writing effectively fosters students' development of these constructs, and it offers a unique window into studying how they relate. In this…

The University of Reading Learning Gain project is a three-year longitudinal project to test and evaluate a range of available methodologies and to draw conclusions on what might be the right combination of instruments for the measurement of Learning Gain in higher education. This paper analyses the validity of a measure of critical thinking…

Statistical modeling is a core component of statistical thinking and has been identified by several countries as a curricular goal for secondary education. However, many secondary teachers have minimal preparation for teaching this topic. The goal of this research study is to learn about teachers' perceptions of the role statistical models play in…

In some randomized clinical trials, patients may die before the measurements of their outcomes. Even though randomization generates comparable treatment and control groups, the remaining survivors often differ significantly in background variables that are prognostic to the outcomes. This is called the truncation by death problem. Under the…

In pedagogical debates about Global Englishes (GE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF), there is widespread agreement concerning an urgent need for liberating teachers and students from the normative constraints of ELT's orientation towards standard English by raising their awareness of the characteristics and complexities of GE/ELF…

This research compared the contributions of lexical inferencing, decoding, and listening comprehension to reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking learners of English as a second language (ESL) enrolled in university bridging programs in the U.S. and Chinese-speaking university learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in mainland China.…

Assessment is a useful process as it provides various stakeholders (e.g., teachers, parents, government, employers) with information about students' competence in a particular subject area. However, for the information generated by assessment to be useful, it needs to support valid inferences. One factor that can undermine the validity of…

The authors propose an integrative theoretical model of reading called the direct and indirect effects model of reading (DIER) that builds on and extends several prominent theoretical models of reading. According to DIER, the following skills and knowledge are involved in reading comprehension: word reading, listening comprehension, text reading…

This study was conducted to understand the reading challenges of underprepared college students. A sample of the participants was enrolled in supplemental literacy programs because they were deemed not ready for reading and writing in college. Community college participants completed a series of measures that assessed foundational skills for…

This study was conducted to understand the reading challenges of underprepared college students. A sample of the participants were enrolled in supplemental literacy programs because they were deemed not ready for reading and writing in college. Community college participants completed a series of measures that assessed foundational skills for…

Case studies appear prominently in political science, sociology, and other social science fields. A scholar employing a case study research design in an effort to estimate causal effects must confront the question, how should cases be selected for analysis? This question is important because the results derived from a case study research program…

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a method for cross-case analyses that works best when complemented with follow-up case studies focusing on the causal quality of the solution and its constitutive terms, the underlying causal mechanisms, and potentially omitted conditions. The anchorage of QCA in set theory demands criteria for follow-up…

Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make…

The effect of guessing on the point estimate of coefficient alpha has been studied in the literature, but the impact of guessing and its interactions with other test characteristics on the interval estimators for coefficient alpha has not been fully investigated. This study examined the impact of guessing and its interactions with other test…

Researchers studying parent-child reminiscing in the preschool years have often focused on parents' and children's elaborative talk (i.e., provision of unique details). The current study proposes a novel conceptualization of parent-child reminiscing narratives by examining 4 levels of abstraction (i.e., a continuum of literal to inferential…