A study involving undergraduate college students enrolled in an introductory psychology course showed that test item arrangement by difficulty or by order of content presentation has no effect on total achievement test score. The data also fail to demonstrate any influence of test item order on student perception of test difficulty. (RM)

Two-hundred-fifty fifth graders participated in this study of the effects of evaluation condition and task difficulty on motivation to return to an initial task. The significant effect for difficulty level resulted from the interaction of difficulty level with evaluation condition. Implications for classroom practice are discussed. (Author/MT)

Interactive effects of item difficulty, test anxiety, and failure feedback are examined in a study using multiple choice verbal aptitude items. Results indicate that ability estimates can be affected by the examinee's improved performance, especially for students given an easy test. (Author/DWH)

Eight special-purpose French-language dictionaries are described, including an illustrated edition, works oriented toward young children and intermediate second-language learners, etymological and grammatical dictionaries, and two literary references. (MSE)

Investigates the performance of 502 children ranging in age from four years to six years, ten months, on two-choice and multiple-choice number comparison tasks, and explores the effects of perceptual manipulations of elements in the multiple-choice tasks. (RH)

Consistent behavior is a desirable characteristic that common items are expected to have when administered to different groups. Findings from the literature have established that items do not always behave in consistent ways; item indices and IRT item parameter estimates of the same items differ when obtained from different administrations.…

The Mantel-Haenszel (MH) differential item functioning (DIF) parameter for uniform DIF is well defined when item responses follow the two-parameter-logistic (2PPL) item response function (IRF), but not when they follow the three-parameter-logistic (3PL) IRF, the model typically used with multiple choice items. This research report presents a…

This article presents an interesting formula which organizes instruction for a course according to the proficiency to be attained at three different levels. (Editor)

Testing the hypothesis that although a complex paragraph takes longer to read than a simple paragraph, there is no difference in the time taken to make the required inference from memory. (MB)

It was hypothesized that individuals who can easily detect differences in the timbre of tone would be more likely to appreciate musical instruments with more complex sound waves, and that the degree of this tendency would be directly proportional to the length of time one has played the instrument. (Authors)