The purpose of this descriptive qualitative study is to better understand how teachers and district leaders respond when implementing a technology instructional support application. The study also explores the influences affecting that implementation process. Secondary mathematics teachers who had been presented with the option to implement a…

Performance assessments have become the norm for evaluating language learners' writing abilities in international examinations of English proficiency. Two aspects of these assessments are usually systematically varied: test takers respond to different prompts, and their responses are read by different raters. This raises the possibility of undue…

In response to the demands of the changing economy and the business community's need for better-educated, more highly skilled workers, the U.S. Department of Education, through the Office of Vocational and Adult Education (OVAE), developed the State Scholars Initiative (SSI), which encourages students to take a rigorous course of study in high…

In this technical report, we describe the development and piloting of a series of mathematics progress monitoring measures intended for use with students in grade 1. These measures, available as part of easyCBM [TM], an online progress monitoring assessment system, were developed in 2008 and administered to approximately 2800 students from schools…

A study was conducted to categorize the questions found in the reading skills development books used in Maryland's community colleges according to Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The study sought to determine the number of questions per taxonomy category; whether there was a significant difference between observed and expected…

This study used meaningful pictorial material to compare the functions relating complexity to two different response variables (voluntary looking time and preference) in 192 students from grades 1 to 8. Age differences were slight, and results are discussed in terms of theories postulating increases with experience in preference for complexity.…

The relationships between mothers' and children's speech were analyzed with regard to complexity and usage of selected speech types. The findings suggest that the responsiveness of child speech to mothers' speech seems to influence the mothers' language complexity, allowing the child to exert an influence on his language environment. (JMB)

This paper focuses on the mechanics and dynamics of questioning techniques as aids to trainers/teachers in "getting across" subject matter and interacting effectively with learners. The mechanics include three levels of questions--knowledge, application and problem-solving. Each of these levels is designed to foster different and…

Determining the extent of consistency between distinct concepts has become increasingly important in current theorizing about the development and organization of cognitive structure. This paper discusses several conceptual and measurement issues that must be addressed in analyses of interconcept consistency: the distinction between connectivity…

A model of test item dependency is presented and used to illustrate the effect that violations of local independence have on the behavior of item characteristic curves. The dependency model is flexible enough to simulate the interaction of a number of factors including item difficulty and item discrimination, varying degrees of item dependence,…

Previous research has concluded that no reliable individual differences have been demonstrated in goal-setting studies, probably because the goals were assigned rather than set by the individuals. This study examined individual's self-set goals, certainty, and task performance of two work periods in a group setting as a function of Type A behavior…

This paper is the transcript of a talk given to those who use test information but who have little technical background in test theory. The concepts of modern test theory are compared with traditional test theory, as well as a probable future test theory. The explanations given are couched within an extended metaphor that allows a full description…

A new indicator of item difficulty, which identifies effectiveness ranges, overcomes the limitations of other item difficulty indexes in describing the difficulty of an item or a test as a whole and in aiding the selection of appropriate ability level items for a test. There are three common uses of the term "item difficulty": (1) the probability…

Educators generally assume that questioning promotes learning and that higher level questions do so better than lower level questions. But there are a number of problems with these assumptions. First, the classification of questions as higher level or lower level is ambiguous. The distinction is confused by such issues as non-controversial…

The main aim of this study was to compare children diagnosed as dysphonetic and dyseidetic on a number of mental processing variables to determine if opposite patterns of relative strength and weakness between the groups could be documented. Another aim was to externally validate the diagnostic criteria, which were based on standardized clinical…