A detailed investigation of the statistical procedure of W. Stout (the computer program DIMTEST) for testing the hypothesis that an essentially unidimensional latent trait model fits observed binary response data from a psychological test is presented. One finding is that DIMTEST may fail to perform as desired in the presence of guessing when…

A study explored perceived reality and developmental differences in viewing theater. Subjects, 33 second graders, 33 fourth graders, 23 sixth graders, and 23 college students viewed a production of "This Is Not a Pipe Dream," a non-representational play based on biographical facts about the early life and work of the surrealist painter…

Judy Harapiak is a teacher who provides her middle years students with many opportunities to respond to stories in different ways, to reflect on their responses, and to link their reading to their own experiences as well as to other areas of the curriculum. She teaches a grade four-five-six class in the Elementary Alternative Education Program…

This study of 51 primarily white families with 3-year-old children was designed to demonstrate the relationship between the qualities of children's narratives and measures of family relationships. Children were asked to complete stories involving a range of affect and conflict themes, parent-child dyads were asked to complete several narratives,…

This paper presents a technique for applying the Rule Space Model of cognitive diagnosis (Tatsuoka, 1983) to assessment in a semantically rich domain. Responses of 122 architects to 22 architecture test items developed to assess a range of architectural knowledge were analyzed using Rule Space. Verbal protocol analysis guided the construction of a…

Karaoke (singing along to music videos) has swept Taiwan with such force that many people go to singing schools to improve their singing. Three cases in this paper demonstrate how the ethos, or credibility, of the singer is a combination of initial and derived ethos. Who the singer is tends to determine how much attention he or she receives…

This report describes what has been learned from three surveys about undergraduate academic dishonesty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The surveys involved 891 undergraduates, approximately 490 faculty, and 481 graduate teaching assistants. Cheating was examined as a literal reality rather than as an abstract concept.…

DIMTEST is a statistical test procedure for assessing essential unidimensionality of binary test item responses. The test statistic T used for testing the null hypothesis of essential unidimensionality is a nonparametric statistic. That is, there is no particular parametric distribution assumed for the underlying ability distribution or for the…

Focusing on ways in which literature can be used in the integration of reading and writing, this book is meant to help teachers prepare a literature-based classroom that encourages reading and writing. The book contains specific practical ideas and activities for organizing a reading/writing classroom, bibliographies of children's books at the end…

Ontario's Transition Years initiatives, designed to change schooling structures and processes and ease early adolescents' transition to high school, seem to place teachers in equally trying and traumatic transitions in their work and careers. Program components challenge teachers' sense of competence and effectiveness and threaten to consume…

A study examined the reactions and responses of new and veteran teachers throughout a full semester graduate in-service course which introduced whole language theory through experiential learning. The 30 K-8 teachers in the course came from 7 schools of a large inner-city school district where 70% of the students lived below the poverty level.…

Expert systems can be used to aid decisionmaking. A computerized adaptive test is one kind of expert system, although not commonly recognized as such. A new approach, termed EXSPRT, was devised that combines expert systems reasoning and sequential probability ratio test stopping rules. Two versions of EXSPRT were developed, one with random…

Working from prior findings on the relationship between transgression, intent, guilt, and other factors, researchers reviewed a series of studies of undergraduate students. The students were offered varying hypothetical scenarios in which a member in a heterosexual relationship meets a friend of the opposite sex in a bar. In each case, after…

The development of a valid measure of academic performance through the application of existing statistical methodology in a new manner was studied. Focus was on analyzing the predictive validity of traditional pre-admissions measures in determining overall academic performance in college. This new criterion, termed a Universal Scale for Grades, is…

Whether item response theory (IRT) is useful to the small-scale testing practitioner is examined. The stability of IRT item parameters is evaluated with respect to the classical item parameters (i.e., p-values, biserials) obtained from the same data set. Previous research investigating the effect of sample size on IRT parameter estimation has…