Background: The aspiration to use evidence to enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of policies is widely shared but often falls short. A common explanation for failure is the presence of barriers to utilising evidence or the inadequacies of the evidence available to policy makers. Aims and objectives: The article examines how and why…

This quasi-experimental study examines the impact of a diagnosis-based pedagogical intervention on the development of micro English as a foreign language (EFL) reading abilities over time. Specifically, 105 first-year graduate students in a Chinese university completed three diagnostic reading assessments at the beginning, middle, and end of a…

Background: It is well-established that children and adolescents with developmental language disorder (DLD) have social-emotional difficulties. This is reflected in their behaviour, for instance, by (social) withdrawal, hyperactivity or difficulty with peer relations. Children with DLD are also known to have poorer quality of life (QoL). This is…

Gamification is a pedagogical strategy that uses the principles and mechanics of game play to facilitate student learning. Despite increased adoption over the last decade, the question of how effective gamification is as a pedagogical strategy remains controversial. Here we report on the impact of a custom developed mobile app that incorporates…

This article presents an updated meta-analysis of survey experiments comparing the performance of the item count technique (ICT) and the direct questioning method. After synthesizing 246 effect sizes from 54 studies, we find that the probability that a sensitive item will be selected is 0.089 higher when using ICT compared to direct questioning.…

Research has begun to investigate the reliability of cannabis-intoxicated eyewitnesses; however, no studies have evaluated eyewitness memory among chronic cannabis users after a minimum 24-h abstinence. This study compared cannabis users' (n = 23) and nonusers' (n = 26) eyewitness recall/identification and investigated the relationship between…

In this paper, we report on the cross-cultural comparative analysis that was undertaken as part of the Social Unit of Learning project investigating student collaborative problem solving in China and Australia. The video-based research examined the 'negotiative foci' of dyadic student interaction during collaborative problem solving within the…

A large and growing body of work has documented robust illusions of area perception in adults. To date, however, there has been surprisingly little in-depth investigation into children's area perception, despite the importance of this topic to the study of quantity perception more broadly (and to the many studies that have been devoted to studying…

Testing English writing skills could be multi-dimensional; thus, the study aimed to compare students' writing scores calculated according to Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Multi-Facet Rasch Model (MFRM). The research was carried out in 2019 with 100 university students studying at a foreign language preparatory class and four experienced…

Providing evidence that can inform awarding is an important application of Comparative Judgement (CJ) methods in high-stakes qualifications. The process of marking scripts is not changed, but CJ methods can assist in the maintenance of standards from one series to another by informing decisions about where to place grade boundaries or cut scores.…

In Comparative Judgement (CJ) exercises, examiners are asked to look at a selection of candidate scripts (with marks removed) and order them in terms of which they believe display the best quality. By including scripts from different examination sessions, the results of these exercises can be used to help with maintaining standards. Results from…

The world population is getting older and, as a result, the number of older victims of crime is expected to increase. It is therefore essential to understand how ageing affects eyewitness identification, so procedures can be developed that enable victims of crime of all ages to provide evidence as accurately and reliably as possible. In criminal…

The goal of this study is to characterize how pre-service teachers recognize students' reasoning, based in the unitizing process, when students solve ratio comparison problems and, how they consider the unitizing process as a Key Development Understanding to propose teaching decisions. Ninety-one pre-service primary teachers interpreted primary…

Background: Grades in college and university STEM courses are an important determinant of student persistence in STEM fields. Recent studies have used the grade offset/grade penalty method to explore why students have lower grades in STEM courses than their GPAs would predict. The results of these studies are in doubt; however, as they use GPA as…

Spelling is a significant parameter in establishing text quality. This study aims to describe the developmental path of spelling errors in expository texts, argumentative and descriptive--written by Hebrew speaking children from second through fifth grades. Bearing in mind different genre requirements, we aimed to determine whether genre type…