Pretest-posttest experimental designs are often used in randomized control trials (RCTs) in the education field to improve the precision of the estimated treatment effects. For logistic reasons, however, pretest data are often collected after random assignment, so that including them in the analysis could bias the posttest impact estimates. Thus,…

Nearly 100 students were given a Pre-Test in psychology on the first day of class without warning in order to assess their knowledge of basic course content derived from the prerequisites of the course (PSYC-100 Introduction to Psychology or PSYC-220 Child Development) and other life experiences. This was intended as a low-stakes testing…

Web Access Pattern (WAP), which is the sequence of accesses pursued by users frequently, is a kind of interesting and useful knowledge in practice. Sequential Pattern mining is the process of applying data mining techniques to a sequential database for the purposes of discovering the correlation relationships that exist among an ordered list of…

In this qualitative pilot study, the authors report on curriculum field trials within a personal learning environment (PLE) designed by a collaboration of academic researchers and nonprofit volunteers working together in the virtual world of Second Life. The purpose of the PLE is to provide learners less likely to have access to educational…

This paper addresses the use of computer-based testing in distance education, based on the experience of Universitas Terbuka (UT), Indonesia. Computer-based testing has been developed at UT for reasons of meeting the specific needs of distance students as the following: (1) students' inability to sit for the scheduled test; (2) conflicting test…

Background: All national curriculum tests in England are pre-tested as part of the development process. Differences in pupil performance between pre-test and live test are consistently found. This difference has been termed the pre-test effect. Understanding the pre-test effect is essential in the test development and selection processes and in…

Pre-tests are a non-graded assessment tool used to determine pre-existing subject knowledge. Typically pre-tests are administered prior to a course to determine knowledge baseline, but here they are used to test students prior to topical material coverage throughout the course. While counterintuitive, the pre-tests cover material the student is…

Business educators understand the value of improving students' written and oral communication skills. However, too often assignments used to develop these important skills are taught in isolation. The purpose of this article is to enhance a student's written and oral skills by integrating all aspects of the job search written documents and…

Distance education has dramatically increased the educational opportunities for underserved populations. This is evidenced by the fairly recent proliferation and success of online universities, and it is happening in spite of criticism of e-learning and online degree programs among academia and the popular press. As a result, many institutions,…

Cognitive pretesting (CP) is an interview methodology for pretesting the validity of items during the development of self-report instruments. This article reports on the development and evaluation of a systematic method to rate self-report item validity performance utilizing CP interview text data. Five raters were trained in the application of…

TWO NEW TESTS WERE DEVELOPED IN THE INTER-AMERICAN TEST SERIES IN PARALLEL ENGLISH AND SPANISH EDITIONS. A PRESCHOOL TEST WAS ADDED TO THE TESTS OF GENERAL ABILITY AND A LEVEL 1 TEST ADDED TO THE TESTS OF READING. ALSO THE SPANISH EDITIONS OF SOME EARLIER TESTS WERE REVISED AND ADDITIONAL INTERPRETATIVE MATERIALS DEVELOPED. THE AUTHOR BELIEVED…

This study evaluated the practical benefit, if any, of using collateral information for one item type when statistically analyzing pretest items of some other item type. The criterion for evaluation of pretest item calibration accuracy was the reduction achieved by the use of collateral information in the number of test takers that must be…

Comparison of two groups of graduate students on each of three achievement criteria gave no evidence that either of two pretests (one course-relevant cognitive, the other non-relevant affective) was influential. (NH)

As part of an NSF funded project we developed new course materials for a general introductory statistics course designed to engage students in statistical discovery. The materials were designed to actively involve students in the design and implementation of data collection and the analysis and interpretation of the resulting data. Our overall…