The study described in this report was designed to measure the attitudes of Virginians towards higher education in Virginia and towards some environmental problems facing the Commonwealth. The survey questioned 517 Virginia citizens over age 18 whose households were chosen through random-digit-telephone dialing. Among the findings of the survey…

Computerized adaptive testing for language teaching and learning takes advantage of two properties of the computer: its number-crunching and multiple-branching capabilities. Adaptive testing has also been called tailored testing because it aims at presenting items that suit the student's competence and that are informative, using an item bank and…

Within the next 3 years, every school district in the country is likely to deal with a new and frightening challenge--dealing with the presence of students or staff members with HIV infection or AIDS. How schools respond to this challenge may well determine the future of U.S. education. Some communities may react with ignorance and fear, just as…

The insights provided by Rasch analysis of results from a literature test were explored. Students in grades 9, 10, and 11 (n=261) responded to a 28-item test before they received one of three treatments: (1) direct instruction, based on research on metacognition in reading, which attempts to give conscious control of strategies used to understand…

In multiple-choice items the response probability on an item may be viewed as the result of two distinct latent processes--a cognitive process to solve the problem, and another random process that leads to the choice of a certain alternative (the process of giving the actual response). An incomplete latent class model is formulated that describes…

A study investigated the use of riddles beginning with How, When, and Why to see which question type was easier for low-achieving students to answer correctly, and to see if practice could increase the number of correct answers chosen. For comparison purposes, scores were also collected for an average-achieving group without practice, to see if…

A study investigated the finding that metacognitive ability and reading level are related, and examined the effects of both presentation and response modes on young children's ability to detect ambiguity in messages. An ambiguity detection test was completed by 74 first grade children (who also completed a reading pretest), 26 second graders, and…

The problems arising from treating word and sentence complexity as the direct causes of difficulty in comprehension are surveyed in this paper from the perspective of readability formulas. The basic choices and assumptions made in the development and use of readability formulas are discussed in relation to the larger question of text…

Designed to provide an alternative to the book report, this booklet presents ideas for students to use in responding to books they have read. These ideas may help to get students to react to their reading, to stretch their minds, to learn to think as independent human beings, and to use their imaginations in experiencing literature. The 152 ideas…

The second language learner cannot be expected to have as strong a drive to refine his language as the first language learner. In first language acquisition, cognitive development and language development occur together, which induces meaningful generalizations. In second language learning, meaning and form are separate, particularly in the…

The transition from high school senior to college freshman reflects the emergence of the adolescent into the young adult and can result in separation anxiety for parent and senior. In order to support the parents and seniors, a seminar on the topic of separation was given to parents and seniors by a child psychiatrist and two high school college…

Although perfectly scalable items rarely occur in practice, Guttman's concept of a scale has proved to be valuable to the development of measurement theory. If the score distribution is uniform and there is an equal number of items at each difficulty level, both the elements and the eigenvalues of the Pearson correlation matrix of dichotomous…

A theory of normal mother-infant relationship based on Margaret Mahler's theories is the basis of a treatment program for disturbed mother/infant relationships. This theory includes the concept of symbiosis which for the child is an undifferentiated condition, a fusion with the mother where the two have a common outward border, thereby protecting…

The beneficial effects of changing an answer on a multiple choice test were examined for elementary school students, with particular emphasis on the answer-changing behavior of minority versus non-minority groups and high-income versus low-income students. Test booklets from students in grade 2 and answer sheets from students in grades 4, 6, and 8…

This paper discusses the use of latent class structure as a modelling framework for tests in which much of the data conforms to a relatively small number of systematic patterns. Application of this framework to the analysis of tests has been limited because available parameter estimation algorithms can only handle a relatively small number of…