This study is part of the core research agenda of the five-year, Goal 3 grant funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U. S. Department of Education "Improving the Teaching and Learning of English Language Learners: The Instructional Conversation Model." In video review of teaching, bias in evaluation or rating is evident in many…

Simulation games are becoming increasingly popular in education, but more insight in their critical design features is needed. This study investigated the effects of fidelity of open patient cases in adjunct to an instructional e-module on students' cognitive skills and motivation. We set up a three-group randomized post-test-only design: a…

Poor language skills can have a negative effect on a developing child if not identified early. Current strategies to identify families with children who may need additional support are limited, and may not detect child language problems before they become entrenched. The present study explores observed indices of parental language as a means of…

Background: Psychometric properties of three functional assessment rating scales were compared for three types of target behaviours [self-injurious behaviour (SIB), stereotypic behaviour and aggressive/destructive behaviour]. Materials and method: The "Questions about Behavioural Function" (QABF), the "Functional Assessment for…

The teaching of imitation skills is often the first step in interventions for young learners with intellectual disabilities. The main goal of this study was to determine the smallest detectable difference (SDD) at 95% confidence of the Preschool Imitation and Praxis Scale (PIPS) in preschoolers with intellectual disabilities. Two raters…

This paper describes one reviewer's experience of reviewing for the journal "System" over an eight-year period, 2003-2011. The paper reports on the reviews produced by the single reviewer, which have been compiled into a specific purpose--an "occluded"--corpus (Swales, 1996) of 122 reviews, comprising 93,000 words. The paper first describes the…

We investigated the effects of systematic changes in levels of treatment integrity by altering errors of commission during error-correction procedures as part of discrete-trial training. We taught 3 students with autism receptive nonsense shapes under 3 treatment integrity conditions (0%, 50%, or 100% errors of commission). Participants exhibited…

Prior research indicates that the overall reliability of performance ratings can be improved by using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to adjust for rater effects. The present investigation extends previous work by evaluating the impact of OLS adjustment on standard errors of measurement ("SEM") at specific score levels. In…

The Yes/No Angoff and Bookmark method for setting standards on educational assessment are currently two of the most popular standard-setting methods. However, there is no research into the comparability of these two methods in the context of language assessment. This study compared results from the Yes/No Angoff and Bookmark methods as applied to…

There is a paucity of instruments designed to measure social competence of adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. The Social Responsiveness Scale is one of a few that can be used. This study compared differences between mother and father reports of social competence of adolescents. Data were collected from parents of 50 adolescents with and…

The goal of this study is to map the current state of research in the field of metacognition in science education, to identify key trends, and to discern areas and questions for future research. We conducted a systematic analysis of 178 studies published in peer-reviewed journals in the years 2000-2012 and indexed in the ERIC database. The…

This study investigated two widely-used early literacy skill's indicators in reflecting growth in first-grade language achievement skills. It compared two curriculum-based assessments of letter knowledge: Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) and Letter Sound Fluency (LSF) in the Arabic language. A sample of 125 first-grade students, 100 average readers and…

A multilevel analysis approach was used to analyse students' evaluation of teaching (SET). The low value of inter-rater reliability stresses that any solid conclusions on teaching cannot be made on the basis of single feedbacks. To assess a teacher's general teaching effectiveness, one needs to evaluate four randomly chosen course implementations.…

The call for school psychologists to demonstrate accountability in the evaluation of services at the individual, group, and system levels comes at a time when school districts nationally are pursuing personnel evaluation models that link teachers' instructional practices to student achievement. School psychologists have an opportunity to take a…

Background/Context: For more than a decade, large alternative teacher certification programs (ATCP) such as the New York City Teaching Fellows (NYCTF) have provided qualified applicants with fast-track or "early entry" routes to paid teaching. While early-entry ATCPs enjoy powerful support in the public and private sectors, critics…