The use of drawing as an assessment tool to reveal students' conceptions in biology specifically on human organs and organ systems is not new, however, there is a deficit in the literature that attempted to explore and reflect on its usefulness and relevance specifically, in eliciting students' preconceptions related thereto. Making use of a…

The purpose of educational assessments is to provide an academic check-up and to give educators and parents meaningful information on what students know and can do, and how well they are progressing toward college and career readiness. Assessments strive to show how well students perform on clearly defined standards and skills that are being…

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted education worldwide as educational systems made the decision to close schools to contain the spread of the virus. The duration of school closures varied greatly internationally. In this study, we use representative trend data from more than 300,000 students in 29 countries to examine whether the cross-country…

In February 2020, California Governor Gavin Newsom's proposed budget recommended suspending the state-mandated physical fitness test (FitnessGram®) for three years due to concerns over bullying and test discrimination against students who identify as gender non-binary and students with disabilities. The purpose of this study was to gain an…

Institutions of higher learning are are returning to test-required admissions policies after finding that standardized tests help them better assess the academic preparedness of all applicants. This brief presents evidence that: (1) The objective standard set by standardized tests makes the college admissions process fairer for students; (2) ACT…

Data harmonization is an emerging approach to strategically combining data from multiple independent studies, enabling addressing new research questions that are not answerable by a single contributing study. A fundamental psychometric challenge for data harmonization is to create commensurate measures for the constructs of interest across…

America's reckoning with racial injustice and the pursuit of equity have led some public school systems to reduce or terminate (or at least question) special programs for high achievers, such as "gifted" education, honors courses, and selective high schools. Historically, such programs have served disproportionately few Black, Hispanic,…

Procrastination in academic contexts is thought to have a negative effect on students' learning and performance. This research sought to provide a comprehensive multi-method and multimodal validation of a self-report measure of procrastination, revealing its intricate associations with behavioral indicators of procrastination, engagement, and…

While the COVID-19 pandemic significantly transformed post-secondary course delivery formats, little attention has been paid to post-pandemic learner preferences. To address this gap, we designed two scales to advance our understanding of learner preferences for online learning modalities: the Modalities of Digital Education -- Learner Preference…

Digital learning increasingly makes use of realistic visualizations, although realism can be demanding for learners. Color coding is a popular way of helping learners understand visualizations and has been found to aid in learning with detailed visualizations. However, previous research has shown that color coding must not always be an effective…

Explicit-reflective nature of science (NOS) instruction has demonstrated a positive impact on student learning. Although explicit-reflective NOS instruction often consists of questions that draw students' attention to NOS ideas, there are few recommendations in the science education literature about how the form of these questions might inform NOS…

Despite a call for evidence-based practice in school psychology, limited research on the topic of evidence-based assessment exists. To begin to address this gap in the research, a modified version of Jenson-Doss and Hawley's (2010) Attitudes Toward Standardized Assessment (ASA) scale was administered to 371 U.S. school psychologists. Examination…

The current study presents an overview of studies investigating educational research instruments development. This study only discusses similar topics in instrument development. The instrument discussed is the assessment of perspective on inclusive education. This research adopted a literature review approach. There are seven research stages:…

This article discusses visual techniques for detecting test items that would be optimal to be selected to the final compilation on the one hand and, on the other hand, to out-select those items that would lower the quality of the compilation. Some classic visual tools are discussed, first, in a practical manner in diagnosing the logical,…

Researchers frequently use Mokken scale analysis (MSA), which is a nonparametric approach to item response theory, when they have relatively small samples of examinees. Researchers have provided some guidance regarding the minimum sample size for applications of MSA under various conditions. However, these studies have not focused on item-level…