This study describes the development and initial psychometric evaluation of a Recognizing Effective Special Education Teachers (RESET) teacher observation instrument. Specifically, the study uses generalizability theory to compare two versions of a rubric, one with general descriptors of performance levels and one with item-specific descriptors of…

The aim of this research is to examine, on the one hand, the internal learning barriers for adults that are derived from their emotions about their educational programme, and on the other, the role of the adult educator in eliminating these obstacles. Emotions are integrally linked to the learning process and influence the successful outcome of…

Career agency is a vaguely defined concept that is usually explained in terms of cultivating self-reliance, while it is at the same time being critiqued as a difficult to reach goal as a result of societal pressures. Instead of viewing agency through the lens of these opposing viewpoints, focused on people either being self-reliant or determined…

Psychometric measurement models are only valid if measurement invariance holds between test takers of different groups. Global model tests, such as the well-established likelihood ratio (LR) test, are sensitive to violations of measurement invariance, such as differential item functioning and differential step functioning. However, these…

Some IRT models can be equivalently modeled in alternative frameworks such as logistic regression. Logistic regression can also model time-to-event data, which concerns the probability of an event occurring over time. Using the relation between time-to-event models and logistic regression and the relation between logistic regression and IRT, this…

Purpose: In survey methodology, it is well-known that interviewers can have an impact on the registered answers. This paper aims to focus on one type of interviewer effect that arises from the differences between interviewers in the systematic effects of each interviewer on the answers. In the first case, the authors evaluate interviewer effects…

Evidence supporting the internal structure of an assessment can provide support for its scoring mechanisms. A total of 1,691 young children in the United States were assessed by their parents using the 16-month questionnaire of the "Ages and Stages Questionnaires," Third Edition (ASQ-3), and results were used to study the internal…

The present study examined whether the ability to recognize vocal emotional expressions is negatively related to features of the Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP) in the general population. We assessed 61 typically developing adults on a BAP self-report measure (Broader Autism Phenotype Questionnaire) and a purpose-developed online emotion…

The paper investigates how the order of numerical data in word problems on division of a whole into unequal parts affects achievement and reasoning of 14-16-year old pupils. The variable was altered in two word problems, in one of which also the context was changed (psychological variable) and in the latter "if-clause" is or is not used…

In this extract from, and commentary on, my master's thesis, "The Brooch of Bergen Belsen: A Journey of Historiographic Poiesis" (winning York University Department of Education Best Major Research Paper 2010), I explore a single aesthetic experience, an encounter with a small hand-made floral cloth brooch donated to the Holocaust…

Skepticism about the limits of online learning is as old as online learning itself. As with other technologically-driven innovations in pedagogy, there are deep-seated worries that important educational goods might be effaced or obscured by the ways of teaching and learning that online methods allow. One family of such worries is inspired by…

Human cognition and behavior are dominated by symbol use. This paper examines the social learning strategies that give rise to symbolic communication. Experiment 1 contrasts an individual-level account, based on observational learning and cognitive bias, with an inter-individual account, based on social coordinative learning. Participants played a…

The current study investigated whether those with higher levels of autism-like traits process emotional information from speech differently to those with lower levels of autism-like traits. Neurotypical adults completed the autism-spectrum quotient and an emotional priming task. Vocal primes with varied emotional prosody, semantics, or a…

The item wording (or keying) effect is respondents' differential response style to positively and negatively worded items. Despite decades of research, the nature of the effect is still unclear. This article proposes a potential reason; namely, that the item wording effect is scale-specific, and thus findings are applicable only to a particular…

Picture books, as both sophisticated aesthetic objects and literary texts, provide the ideal site for critically examining how values and ideology are transmitted to children. How the child reader might be affected by the process of reading a picture book--that is, how he or she might be moved emotionally and potentially gain new insights about…