Discusses a longitudinal study of young children's acquisition of complex sentences for expressing their beliefs about causally related events, in the transition in language development from simple to complex syntax. While most of the children's statements expressed subjective meaning overall, the acquisition of syntactic connectives was…

This study explored the relationship between college student achievement and two other dimensions: cognitive complexity and the concreteness or abstractness of selected concepts. Although the level of abstractness alone did not influence achievement, the cognitive complexity of the item and the interaction of the two main effects was significant.…

Five elementary level males with learning disabilities read material at two levels of difficulty in a multi-element design. Findings suggested that oral reading rate and reading comprehension performance are more strongly linked than previously suggested. (CL)

The linearly ordered content domain (LOCD) concept is discussed. A logistic analysis of the occurrence of first introduction of spelling words into the curriculum is presented, the results, along with word length, number of neutralized vowels, and an index of word familiarity are used to predict word location on the spelling LOCD. (Author/DWH)

Kindergarten through eighth-grade children were presented with two revisions (luck and skill) of the Matching Familiar Figures Test. Questioning about performance of hypothetical others revealed four levels of differentiation of luck and skill. These levels showed parallels with age-related changes in conceptions of difficulty, effort, and…

Using a complex, computerized decision-making task, 56 university students participated in a six-week, repeated measures, goal-setting project, involving different payment systems. Results indicated that goal-contingent payment is superior to hourly payment in influencing performance, even though the perceived valence of payment and the actual…

Two factors, language difficulty and option set convergence, were experimentally manipulated and their effects on item difficulty assessed. Option convergence was found to have a significant effect on item difficulty while the effect of language difficulty was not significant. (Author/BW)

The Math Lab is a creative approach to teaching math concepts. Students are introduced to skills through several conceptual levels. Concrete level activities are followed by semiconcrete, semiabstract, and abstract levels of instruction. Examples of teaching methods for each level are offered. (DF)

Three tests with increasingly more difficult sentence structures, developed for use with children at fourth-grade level or below in reading vocabulary and in mathematical computations, were administered to 30 eighth-grade Ss. Results revealed a significant difference between the test with greater syntactical complexity and the two other tests.…

The purposes of this research study were to develop and field test anchor-based judgmental methods for enabling test specialists to estimate item difficulty statistics. The study consisted of three related field tests. In each, researchers worked with six Law School Admission Test (LSAT) test specialists and one or more of the LSAT subtests. The…

This paper discusses the limitations of Classical Test Theory, the purpose of Item Response Theory/Latent Trait Measurement models, and the step-by-step calculations in the Rasch measurement model. The paper explains how Item Response Theory (IRT) transforms person abilities and item difficulties into the same metric for test-independent and…

This paper discusses the use of two theories of item analysis and test construction, their strengths and weaknesses, and applications to the design of the Hawaii State Test of Essential Competencies (HSTEC). Traditional analyses of the data collected from the HSTEC field test were viewed from the perspectives of item difficulty levels and item…

This paper presents an application of the bookmark procedure to a test comprised of increasing text difficulty levels. The Test of English Proficiency for Adults (TEPA) was used for this study. Three forms of the TEPA were field tested in 1999 with approximately 1,000 non-native English speaking students enrolled in English-as-a-Second-Language…

A common practice in some certification fields (e.g., information technology) is to draw items from an item pool randomly and apply a common passing score, regardless of the items administered. Because these tests are commonly used, it is important to determine how accurate the pass/fail decisions are for such tests and whether fairly small,…

The convention for selecting starting points (that is, initial items) on a computerized adaptive test (CAT) is to choose as starting points items of medium difficulty for all examinees. Selecting a starting point based on prior information about an individual's ability was first suggested many years ago, but has been believed unimportant provided…