Parent report has proven a valid and cost-effective means of evaluating early child language. Norming datasets for these instruments, which provide the basis for standardized comparisons of individual children to a population, can also be used to derive norms for the acquisition of individual words in production and comprehension and also early…

The purpose of this theoretical essay is to encourage critical reflection of the relationship of specific reading events to traditional conceptualizations of reader stance. While conventional models of reader stance are useful for considering many aspects of reading, there are reading events that engender stances that appear to lie outside of the…

Longitudinal data analysis has long played a significant role in empirical research within the developmental sciences. The past decade has given rise to a host of new and exciting analytic methods for studying between-person differences in within-person change. These methods are broadly organized under the term "growth curve models." The…

Juvenile awareness programs like Scared Straight became popular crime prevention strategies during the 1970s. Juvenile offenders and at-risk youth who participate in these programs are taken to prisons where inmates use confrontational methods to recount stories about violence, sex, and abuse perpetrated by fellow inmates while living a life…

This study examines eighth grade students' use of a representational metaphor (cups and tiles) for writing and solving equations in one unknown. Within this study, we focused on the obstacles and difficulties that students experienced when using this metaphor, with particular emphasis on the operations that can be meaningfully represented through…

In this paper, we consider theories about processes of visual perception and perception-based knowledge representation (VPR) in order to explain difficulties encountered in figural processing in junior high school geometry tasks. In order to analyze such difficulties, we take advantage of the following perspectives of VPR: (1) Perceptual…

The author is increasingly sensitive to the Venn diagram of overlapping expertise in which program evaluation intersects a content area such as public health, urban education, or--in the case of Katherine Hay--international development. Many evaluators practice in these areas of overlap, experts in the evaluation of a specific domain. Given her…

In the complex practice of today's blended learning, educators need to be able to evaluate both online and face-to-face communication in order to get the full picture of what is going on in blended learning scenarios. The aim of this study was to investigate the reliability and feasibility of a practical instrument for analysing face-to-face…

Purpose: The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association's (ASHA's) National Outcomes Measurement System (NOMS) was developed in the late 1990s. The primary purpose was to serve as a source of data for speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who found themselves called on to provide empirical evidence of the functional outcomes associated with their…

Purpose: The present study had two purposes: provide an illustration of use of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Children's (CNLSY; U.S. Department of Labor, 2009) database and use the database to seek convergent evidence regarding the magnitude and significance of genetic effects influencing low and typical performers on measures of…

We present a data-based perspective concerning recent (e.g., 2008) "Maclean's" magazine rankings of Canadian universities, including cluster analysis of the 2008 data. Canadian universities empirically resemble and relate to each other in a manner different from their formal classification and final rank ordering in the…

The nature of anatomy education has changed substantially in recent decades, though the traditional multiple-choice written examination remains the cornerstone of assessing students' knowledge. This study sought to measure the quality of a clinical anatomy multiple-choice final examination using item response theory (IRT) models. One hundred…

This study compared low-income Mexican American parents of young children referred for behavior problems to their nonreferred counterparts on an observational measure of parent-child interactions. Referred Mexican American parents demonstrated more negative behaviors than their nonreferred counterparts in both nondirective and highly directive…

Measuring quality of service in academic libraries traditionally includes quantifiable data such as collection size, staff counts, circulation numbers, reference service statistics, qualitative analyses of customer satisfaction, shelving accuracy, and building comfort. In the libraries of the third millennium, virtual worlds, Web content and…

People use external knowledge representations (KRs) to identify, depict, transform, store, share, and archive information. Learning how to work with KRs is central to be-coming proficient in virtually every discipline. As such, KRs play central roles in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. We describe five key roles of KRs in assessment: (1)…