Fisher's information measure for the item difficulty parameter in the Rasch model and its marginal and conditional formulations are investigated. It is shown that expected item information in the unconditional model equals information in the marginal model, provided the assumption of sampling examinees from an ability distribution is made. For the…

This report summarizes the results of more than 10,000 individual judgments, carried out in five related studies, all concerned with perceived reading efforts of text on visual displays and printouts. Students and personnel in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Stockholm served as study subjects. In experiments in which…

Children's ability to learn aspects of their language in the absence of supportive evidence is discussed. Specifically, the learnability of null subjects in languages in which they appear is examined when indirect negative evidence is present. It is concluded that parameters such as the null subject parameter may not generate languages, strictly…

A survey of the current research on readability formulas is presented in this paper, which distinguishes this research from research on the more general questions that surround formulas: What features of a text, particularly the language it is written in, make the text easy or difficult to read? and, What will predict that readers with particular…

Two experiments investigated causes of children's selection of easy tasks in task choice situations. Experiment 1 probed the effects of experimenter presence on task choices of 55 Japanese children ranging in age from 66 to 76 months, of whom 32 were boys and 23 were girls. A total of 30 subjects were assigned to an experimenter attending…

To investigate developmental differences, preschoolers' performance on four tasks frequently used to measure their understanding of causal and temporal relationships was studied. Based on an analysis of cognitive processes involved in recognition, completion, construction/seriation, and verbal explanation tasks, the prediction was made that…

Instructional time to high proficiency or response time to high proficiency performance can be viewed as linearly related to the effective complexity of the task/display combination which is the essence of instruction or of performance. This proposition is concretely illustrated for bar graph-using performance of 4th and 6th graders who under most…

The purpose of this paper is to present a generalization of the concept of item difficulty to test items that measure more than one dimension. Three common definitions of item difficulty were considered: the proportion of correct responses for a group of individuals; the probability of a correct response to an item for a specific person; and the…

An experiment was performed to test predictions based on a combination of the frequency theory of verbal discrimination learning and Taylor-Spence drive theory, the latter of which postulates a Drive Level x Task Complexity interaction. (Editor)

An organizational framework based on developmental needs is advocated for use in planning instruction in map skills. An outline of an individualized approach to map skill development from the Wisconsin Design for Reading Skill Development is presented. (SDH)

Acknowledging widely recognized shortcomings of readability formulas, the authors propose a technique for analyzing syntactic complexity. (RB)

The patterning of recall of linguistic subunits was found to be strongly related to the semantic dimensions of abstractness-concreteness, specificity of denotation, comprehensibility, and interest. (Author/BJG)

Based on the author's M.A. dissertation submitted to the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Paper based on PhD dissertation submitted to the University of Kansas. Research supported by Public Health Service Grant No. 5-FI-MH-30, 582-02.

Some basic concepts of the one-parameter logistic latent-trait model, or the Rasch model, are presented. This model assumes that the probability of a correct answer to an item is a function of two parameters, one representing the difficulty of the item and one representing the ability of the subject. The purpose of this paper is to explain a…