Cultural consensus theory (CCT) is a data aggregation technique with many applications in the social and behavioral sciences. We describe the intuition and theory behind a set of CCT models for continuous type data using maximum likelihood inference methodology. We describe how bias parameters can be incorporated into these models. We introduce…

The determination of Pass/Fail decisions over Borderline grades, (i.e., grades which do not clearly distinguish between the competent and incompetent examinees) has been an ongoing challenge for academic institutions. This study utilises the Objective Borderline Method (OBM) to determine examinee ability and item difficulty, and from that…

Research on variables related to test performance has produced mixed results. Typically, research of this type involves only a few variables. In an attempt to obtain a more complete picture, we investigated how test grades might be related to variables such as classification, student seating location, test completion time, predicted grade, time…

Students engage in higher-order thinking as they read complex texts and perform complex reading-related tasks. However, the most consequential assessments, high-stakes tests, are currently limited in providing information about students' higher-order thinking. In this article, we describe higher-order thinking in relation to reading. We provide a…

The purpose of our study is to examine business students' perceptions of their online class experience relative to the traditional in-class experience; specifically, whether a descriptive, theoretical or analytical course would be preferred as an online or traditional course. Two hundred and ninety students enrolled in upper-level business courses…

Previous mathematics and science education research indicates that knowledge and beliefs, including teaching efficacy, affect teachers' actions and effectiveness in a classroom. Our middle grades and high school Self-Efficacy to Teach Statistics (SETS) instruments, aligned with the statistical concepts in national and state guidelines such as the…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

Background: While illustrations are widely used in international test comparisons, very scant research has been conducted on their design and on their influence on student performance. It is not clear how the features of illustration act in combination supporting students' access to the content of items or increasing their interpretation demands.…

The following is a report on an investigation into ways of supporting teachers in converting challenging mathematics tasks into classroom lessons and supporting students in engaging with those tasks. Groups of primary and secondary teachers, respectively, were provided with documentation of ten lessons built around challenging tasks. Teachers…

Using data collected from two multiyear teacher professional development projects employing randomized control trials, this study describes the development and validation of a paper-based test of elementary teachers' science content knowledge (SCK). Evidence of construct validity is presented, including evidence on internal structural…

Although a reader's text-level comprehension is affected by the comprehension of individual sentences in a text, little attention has been paid to the difficulty of sentences. This study investigates whether measures (features) of text difficulty affect the "gradience" observed in sentence difficulty judgments. We examine two traditional…

Mathematics is an indispensable subject of school curriculum and is important in daily living as well as in the study of other subjects. However, there is a common belief that majority of the students dislike mathematics, owing to an array of factors related to instruction and learners' cognitive, affective and psychomotor attributes, subject…

Responses of 223 students in grades 6 to 11 to questions related to beliefs about getting out of bed on the left side are analysed from two perspectives. On one hand the items explore subjective beliefs about chance. On the other hand the different wording and context of the items provide opportunity to show different levels of understanding of…

Chemistry has been looked upon as a challenging subject by teachers, students and researchers because of the abstract nature of content in chemistry, teaching styles applied in class, and the difficulty of the language of chemistry. Cognitive load for the novice learner has a significant role in creating difficulties in chemistry learning.…

Despite the need for scientific research in psychology to solve the different psychosocial problems of the country (family violence and corruption, for example), studies in this area are not still enough. One of the ways to encourage research is by doing a thesis. However, many students opt for other types of jobs for that purpose. The objective…