Justification of testing practice involves moving from one state of knowledge about the test to another. Theories of test validity can (a) focus on the beginning of the process, (b) focus on the end, or (c) encompass the entire process. Analyses of four case studies test and illustrate three claims: (a) restrictions on validity entail a supplement…

Daniel Koretz is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His research focuses on educational assessment and policy, particularly the effects of high-stakes testing on educational practice and the validity of score gains. He is the author of "Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells…

In an article published in "Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice," Gaertner and McClarty (2015) discuss a college readiness index based, in part, on nonacademic or noncognitive factors measured in middle school. Such an index is laudable as it incorporates important constructs beyond academic achievement measures that may be…

Narrative research is a commonly employed research methodology. In narrative research, researchers capture the testimony of their participants on a myriad of topics, e.g. how they feel about teaching or how they feel their ethnic background influences the way that they analyze concepts. Such testimony in narrative educational research commonly…

Proving an existence theorem is less intuitive than proving other theorems. This article presents a semiotic analysis of significant fragments of classroom meaning-making which took place during the class-session in which the existence of the midpoint of a line-segment was proven. The purpose of the analysis is twofold. First follow the evolution…

The authors argue here that contemporary use of action research shares the exploratory, inductive nature of many qualitative research approaches--no matter the type of data collected--because the type of research problems studied are set in complex, dynamic, rapidly changing contexts and because action research is undertaken to support social and…

We use the hyperbolic cotangent function to deduce another proof of Euler's formula for ?(2n).

This study involved the development of the Stages of Change in Relationship Status (SOCRS) measure in 2 samples of college students. This scale is designed to measure how individuals progress through stages of change when terminating violent and nonviolent intimate relationships. Results indicated that the SOCRS is a reliable and valid tool to…

Six cardinal leadership virtues based on Aristotelian and Confucian typology were advanced through this study by developing a measurement instrument and examining its predictive validity by studying the causal association with perceived leader happiness. Based on a sample of 183 school principals engaged in various types of schools, the results of…

In this paper we explore how students construe what it means for an informal argument to be the basis of a proof. We use students' attention as a proxy for their conceptions and document what they pay attention to when assessing whether a proof is based on an informal argument. The data illustrate that some undergraduate mathematics students pay…

Fairness, an essential quality of a test, has been broadly defined as equitable treatment of all test-takers during the testing process, absence of measurement bias, equitable access to the constructs being measured, and justifiable validity of test score interpretation for the intended purpose(s) (AREA, APA, & NCME, 2014). Given that test…

The number of malicious files present in the public domain continues to rise at a substantial rate. Current anti-malware software utilizes a signature-based method to detect the presence of malicious software. Generating these pattern signatures is time consuming due to malicious code complexity and the need for expert analysis, however, by making…

This study examined the convergent validity of the "Supports Intensity Scale-Adult Version" (SIS-A; Thompson et al., 2015a) and "Supports Intensity Scale-Children's Version" (SIS-C; Thompson et al., 2016a). Data from SISOnline (n = 129,864) for the SIS-A and from the SIS-C standardization sample (n = 4,015) were used for…

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has released a report, "Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments," ostensibly an evaluative comparison of four testing programs, the Common Core derived SBAC and PARCC, ACT's Aspire, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' MCAS. Of course, anyone familiar with Fordham's past work…

In recent years, substantial improvements were obtained in the effectiveness of data driven algorithms to validate the mapping of items to skills, or the Q-matrix. In the current study we use ensemble algorithms on top of existing Q-matrix refinement algorithms to improve their performance. We combine the boosting technique with a decision tree.…