To examine the effect of structural factors on the development of story appreciation, a developmental model of story liking for suspense stories was tested by having second, fourth, and sixth grade children rate suspense stories on 10 affective scales. Specifically, the model predicted that (1) reader identification would increase with greater…

This research was designed to construct an instrument to measure teacher's expectancies for internal or external control of important aspects of the work of teaching. Items were composed for initial trial based on fourteen areas which past research has shown to be important satisfiers in teaching. The 75 items in the initial pool were administered…

Changes in teacher behavior in response to different types of feedback were examined. Subjects were faculty members from a two-year college. Five types of feedback were selected: (1) videotapes made during one class period; (2) the Bellack system, which provides the teacher with an observer-made graph of frequencies of teacher and student…

Although the importance of social skill to interactions with others has long been recognized for clinical individuals, such skills are also of benefit to non-clinical populations. To investigate the potential relationships between social skill and interpersonal conflict resolution tactics, 287 college students (140 males and 147 females) completed…

Omitted items cannot properly be treated as wrong when estimating ability and item parameters. A convenient method for utilizing the information provided by omissions is presented. Theoretical and empirical justifications are presented for the estimates obtained by the new method. (Author)

The authors of this essay regularly require students to engage in informal writing as a means to promote learning. One form of informal writing is the summary/reaction journal. In summary/reaction journals, students read a chapter or article, write a summary of that reading, and then react by offering their own insights and responses to the…

Diagnostic score reports linking assessment outcomes to instructional interventions are one of the most requested features of assessment products. There is a body of interesting work done in the last 20 years including Tatsuoka's rule space method (Tatsuoka, 1983), Haertal and Wiley's binary skills model (Haertal, 1984; Haertal & Wiley, 1993),…

SCORIGHT is a very general computer program for scoring tests. It models tests that are made up of dichotomously or polytomously rated items or any kind of combination of the two through the use of a generalized item response theory (IRT) formulation. The items can be presented independently or grouped into clumps of allied items (testlets) or in…

Large-scale educational assessments such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) sample examinees to whom an exam will be administered. In most situations the sampling design is not a simple random sample and must be accounted for in the estimating model. After reviewing the current operational estimation procedure for NAEP, this…

Intended to help teachers find their way through the world of visual media and listing works selected by experienced teachers and practitioners, this annotated bibliography contains nearly 100 items. The bibliography is divided into sections on: (1) film studies; (2) television studies; (3) response and intertextuality; (4) video production; (5)…

This paper examines the ethos-centered crusade in which the evangelist, not a doctrine or a political/social issue, becomes the reason the audience attends to the message. The paper analyses how the Billy Graham crusades fit this definition--the fame of the evangelist extends beyond any individual crusade, the message preached by the evangelist…

A qualitative study examined the ways in which middle school and high school students create meanings when they are reading literary and non-literary texts. Subjects, 18 seventh-grade and 18 eleventh-grade students attending schools in an inner city or a suburban school district and judged by their teachers to be either above, at, or below average…

Rank ordering examinees is an easier task for judges than is awarding numerical ratings. A measurement model for rankings based on Rasch's objectivity axioms provides linear, sample-independent and judge-independent measures. Estimates of examinee measures are obtained from the data set of rankings, along with standard errors and fit statistics.…

The current status of item response theory (IRT) is discussed. Several IRT methods exist for assessing whether an item is biased. Focus is on methods proposed by L. M. Rudner (1975), F. M. Lord (1977), D. Thissen et al. (1988) and R. L. Linn and D. Harnisch (1981). Rudner suggested a measure of the area lying between the two item characteristic…

Two modification formulas are presented for the test information function in order to provide better measures of local accuracies of the estimation of "theta" when maximum likelihood estimation is used to provide the estimate of ability "theta." A minimum bound of any estimator, biased or unbiased, is considered; and Formula 1…