This study investigates whether raters' knowledge of test takers' first language (L1) affects how the raters orient themselves to the task of rating oral speech. The authors qualitatively investigated the effects of accent familiarity on raters' score assignment processes. Twenty-six trained raters with a second language of Mandarin Chinese,…

Student response systems, often called clickers, have become more popular and visible in the K-12 classroom in recent years. There are numerous competing systems on the market, but all perform the same function: to allow the student to use a small hand-held device (i.e., a clicker), or even web browsers on laptops or mobile phones, to respond to…

There is growing evidence that children with reading difficulties show impaired auditory rhythm perception and impairments in musical beat perception tasks. Rhythmic musical interventions with poorer readers may thus improve rhythmic entrainment and consequently improve reading and phonological skills. Here we compare the effects of a musical…

With the increasing availability of technology, one issue that has arisen in foreign language education is the use of online translation (OT) sites that claim to convert text from one language to another but are generally prohibited for classwork due to ethical and pedagogical concerns. In a study to explore the effects of OT usage, teacher raters…

This article focuses on the use of natural language processing (NLP) to facilitate second language learning within the context of academic English. It describes a full cycle of educational software development, from needs analysis to software testing. Two studies are included: 1) the needs analysis conducted to develop the Intelligent Sentence…

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) are institutions developed to educate minority students. Several HBCUs expanded and opened nursing programs to educate more minority nurses in the nursing profession. The challenge of HBCUs is to consistently meet the Board of Nursing requirements; this warranted further exploration of reasons…

A single subject study with multiple baselines across participants was used to explore the effect of giving access to picture-to-text software for writing to young students, with moderate autism, and documented difficulties with written language. For this intervention study, three participants, who had strengths in visual processing and who were…

The role of a graduate-level academic advisor is essential to all levels of higher education. With the introduction of the Post 9/11 GI Bill, there has been an influx of military and student veterans enrolling in postsecondary and graduate-level education programs. The role of the academic advisor has increased significantly with the influx of…

The Essential Skills Team knows that each student has a unique learning style, home and school environment, academic and personal strengths and experiences, and family backgrounds. One of the goals when creating the Essential Skills Campus was to provide resources that harness the strengths and experiences students bring with them to their first…

Improvements in Information Technology (IT) infrastructure and standardization of interoperability standards among heterogeneous Information System (IS) applications have brought a paradigm shift in the way an IS application could be used and delivered. Not only an IS application can be built using standardized component but also parts of it can…

This study was designed with the overall goal of understanding how difficulties in reading comprehension are associated with early adolescents' performance in large-scale assessments in subject domains including science and civic-related social studies. The current study extended previous research by taking a cognition-centered approach based on…

Computer programming skills constitute one of the core competencies that graduates from many disciplines, such as engineering and computer science, are expected to possess. Developing good programming skills typically requires students to do a lot of practice, which cannot sustain unless they are adequately motivated. This paper reports a…

It seems appropriate, if not necessary, to use empirically supported criteria to evaluate reading software applications. This study's purpose was to develop a research-based evaluation framework and review selected beginning reading software that might be used with struggling beginning readers. Thirty-one products were reviewed according to…

There are three fundamental problems in Sijtsma ("Psychometrika," 2008): (1) contrary to the name, the glb is not the greatest lower bound of reliability but rather is systematically less than omega[subscript t] (McDonald, "Test theory: A unified treatment," Erlbaum, Hillsdale, 1999), (2) we agree with Sijtsma that when considering how well a test…

A CMI-based online forum is designed to address the need for a system to manage students' online participation. The proposed system may reduce the time required to manage online participation. The system was evaluated by a total of 64 students enrolled in an academic semester. The evaluation has two objectives. The first was to determine the…