"Naturalization Test Redesign Project: Civics Item Selection Analysis" provides an overview of the development of content items for the U.S. history and government (civics) portion of the redesigned naturalization test. This document also reviews the process used to gather and analyze data from multiple studies to determine which civics…

The purpose of this study was to develop a valid and reliable survey instrument to be used by librarians and other educational leaders to measure implementation of a school's information literacy program. The goal was to create an instrument that would consider implementation of a library-centered program within the context and culture of the…

This paper concerns the divisibility of comprehension subskills measured in L2 listening and reading tests. Motivated by the administration of the new Web-based English as a Second Language Placement Exam (WB-ESLPE) at UCLA, this study addresses the following research questions: first, to what extent do the WB-ESLPE listening and reading items…

Objective: The objective of this study is to develop and validate the Chinese Making Sense of Adversity Scale (CMSAS) to measure the cognitive coping strategies that Chinese people adopt to make sense of adversity. Method: A 12-item CMSAS was developed by in-depth interview and item analysis. The scale was validated with a sample of 627 Chinese…

Many of the currently available statistical indexes to detect answer copying lack sufficient power at small [alpha] levels or when the amount of copying is relatively small. Furthermore, there is no one index that is uniformly best. Depending on the type or amount of copying, certain indexes are better than others. The purpose of this article was…

College and university administrators, as well as faculty members, are more likely to take responsibility for student learning if they believe that the assessment data represent their students and suggest specific actions for improvement. This study examined whether it is feasible to develop scalelets (i.e., focused measures, usually consisting of…

Investigations of reading have focused largely on two component processes, phonological processing and orthographic processing. However, a number of unresolved issues have hampered progress in the investigation of these abilities. Three such issues that formed the focus of the present study were (1) the extent to which tasks used to operationalize…

Our aim was to extend the literature by examining the presence of manic symptoms in persons with intellectual deficits with and without bipolar disorder for 3 years. Three groups (bipolar, psychopathology other than bipolar disorder, and no Axis I diagnosis) were formed with 14 participants in each group. Initially, the presence of mania symptoms…

H. Bosch, F. Steinkamp, and E. Boller's (see record 2006-08436-001) review of the evidence for psychokinesis confirms many of the authors' earlier findings. The authors agree with Bosch et al. that existing studies provide statistical evidence for psychokinesis, that the evidence is generally of high methodological quality, and that effect sizes…

A decade ago, S. Aglioti, J. F. X. DeSouza, and M. A. Goodale (1995) published an experiment that has had a big influence on the way that visual information is thought to control human behavior. Their findings have often been simplified as suggesting that action is immune to perceptual illusions. The current authors critically analyze the 4 steps…

Evaluation of teaching remains an inaccurate undertaking. Many believe that taking into factor the numbers of classes taught, students taught, graduate students supervised, honors contacts made, and undergraduates mentored are the best quantifiable measures for teaching. However, this author argues that such measures do little to provide a useful…

Despite the existence of little empirical evidence for their effectiveness, many techniques have been suggested for writing multiple-choice items. The option "none of the above" (NA) has been widely used although a recent review of empirical studies of NA suggests that, while generally decreasing the difficulty index, NA also decreases…

Simulations were performed to verify the accuracy with which the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) and Rasch PROX procedures recover simulated item bias. Several standard error estimators for the MH procedure were evaluated. Item bias is recovered satisfactorily by both techniques under all simulated conditions. The proposed MH standard error estimators have…

This is a user's guide to the Student-Problem Package (SPP), a software package for the IBM-PC that provides three sub-programs for analyzing item response patterns. These analyses are based on student-problem (S-P) curve theory. The SPP User's Guide provides: (1) a brief introduction to response pattern analysis; (2) an overview of the…

The content of each of the Occupational and Nonoccupational scales on the Strong Vocational Interest Blank for Women was described in terms of the categories used for the Basic Interest scales. Several shortcomings of the SVIB-W were noted. (Author)