Immigrant populations are growing and permanently changing the demographic profile of the United States. Diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds are manifested in the families in each community, imposing demands and challenges to agencies that provide services to them. A large population of immigrant families, especially first and second…

Evidence from this Spring 2012 pilot suggests feedback about AISD teachers can be reliably obtained from students at all grade levels, and that such feedback can provide a valid supplemental measure of teacher quality to accompany additional indicators.

Life sciences faculty agree that developing scientific literacy is an integral part of undergraduate education and report that they teach these skills. However, few measures of scientific literacy are available to assess students' proficiency in using scientific literacy skills to solve scenarios in and beyond the undergraduate biology classroom.…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the quality culture and workforce performance in the Malaysian higher education sector. The study also aims to test and validate the psychometric properties of the quality culture and workforce performance instruments used in the study. Design/methodology/approach: A total…

This article presents 2 studies aimed at validating a measure of stress experienced by children and parents around the issue of homework, applying Benson's program of validation (Benson, 1998). Study 1 provides external validity of the measure by supporting hypothesized relations between stress around homework and students' and parents' positive…

The Indicators of Successful Inclusion Scale (ISIS) was developed to measure pre-service and practicing educators' beliefs regarding factors that contribute to educating students with disabilities in general education classrooms. The measure was designed to assess teachers' beliefs and attitudes related to inclusive education and to consider their…

The NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) is often used in field-based research and clinical studies as it is designed to measure the same personality dimensions as the longer NEO Personality Inventory in a shorter time frame. In this study, the authors examined the reliability and structural validity of the NEO-FFI scores at the item level in a…

The challenges in teaching and learning of biological evolution continue to be documented (NAS, 2008). Developers of science standards continue their work to increase emphasis on evolution. Although gains have been made, many K-12 science curricula focus on microevolution (i.e., natural selection, genetic drift), and a more limited effort is in…

Background: From the perspective of self-regulated learning, the interplay between learners' individual characteristics and the context of testing have been emphasized for assessing learning outcomes. Aims: The present study examined metacognitive processes in children's test-taking behaviour and explored their impacts on performance. Further, it…

In this paper, we argue that, as indicators of the educational quality of graduate degree programs, student theses and dissertations are best used in specific contexts. High-quality theses and dissertations, that is, may be the result of factors such as verbal skills students already possessed at admission or of complex interactions between…

Current value-added models for teacher accountability are better than models based only on student achievement, but they have their weakness. They are subject to systematic and random error, as are all measures, and there are concerns about the tests used for the measurements. However, value-added models are better than the alternatives at the…

Pointing to declines in self-reported criminality across waves of the National Youth Survey, several researchers have concluded that "testing effects" may render longitudinal self-report data unreliable. This article argues that the issue remains unsettled on two accounts. First, alternative explanations for the declines have not been fully…

The "Attitudes Towards Integration Scale" (ATIS) assesses the attitude of the general public towards the school integration of children with disabilities. The scale was empirically created in a pilot study (n=351) and later used to survey 2158 people. The data from both surveys are analysed in the present paper; the results show that the…

The current version of the International Language Testing Association (ILTA) Guidelines for Practice requires language testers to pretest items before including them on an exam, or when pretesting is not possible, to conduct post-hoc item analysis to ensure any malfunctioning items are excluded from scoring. However, the guidelines are devoid of…

This study investigated the breakdown effect of a listening comprehension test, whether test takers are affected in comprehending lectures by impediments, and collected test takers' cognitive awareness on test tasks which contain listening breakdown factors how they perceived these impediments. In this context of the study, a "Breakdown" is a test…