With new Common Core State Standards assessments in K12 mathematics due to be in use by the start of the 2014-2015 school year, many district administrators and teachers do not know what they should know about them now and are not taking steps they should be taking to prepare for them. While they are aware that the assessments are being developed,…

Outsourcing of jobs to contract workers who work alongside a client's employees has changed the human resource landscape of many organizations. In this study we examine how a contract worker's perceived employment status similarity to the client's own standard employees influences his/her affective commitment to both the client and the employer…

Latent difference score models (e.g., McArdle & Hamagami, 2001) are extended to include effects from prior changes to subsequent changes. This extension of latent difference scores allows for testing hypotheses where recent changes, as opposed to recent levels, are a primary predictor of subsequent changes. These models are applied to…

Factors that lead to poor achievement in literacy are evident prior to a child beginning kindergarten. In the present study, we examined the importance of including attention in a model for predicting emergent literacy in prekindergarten and subsequent reading abilities in kindergarten. The sample was 250 children attending public prekindergarten…

In this paper, we investigate the effects of competition on the performance of Italian secondary schools as measured by maths achievement scores (PISA 2006 dataset). Competition is measured by an indicator of "perceived" competition (generated from an answer provided by the schools' principals). The methodology employed is a propensity…

This study compared modeling skills and knowledge structures of four groups as seen in their understanding of air quality. The four groups were: experts (atmospheric scientists), intermediates (upper-level graduate students in a different field), advanced novices (talented 11th and 12th graders), and novices (10th graders). It was found that when…

The study of knowledge transfer rarely draws upon motivational constructs in empirical work. We investigated how students' achievement goals interact with different forms of instruction to promote "transfer," defined as preparation for future learning (Bransford & Schwartz, 1999) Students were given either invention or tell-and-practice activities…

This review departs from current practice in reviewing tests in that it employs an "argument-based approach" to test validation to guide the review (e.g. Bachman, 2005; Kane, 2006; Mislevy, Steinberg, & Almond, 2002). Specifically, it follows an approach to test development and use that Bachman and Palmer (2010) call the process of "assessment…

Unlike many other high-stakes exams which test students only at the end of a course, the English A levels use a modular format where students are allowed to resit past units within the course. Since the introduction of resits for A levels in 2000, the A level results have been improving significantly and resits are seen as the main reason for the…

Socioeconomic inequalities in children's skills and capabilities begin early in life and can have detrimental effects on future success in school. The present study examined the relationships between school readiness and socioeconomic (SES) inequalities using teacher reports of the Short Early Development Instrument (Janus et al. 2005) in a…

The current experiments explored the parafoveal processing of transposed-letter (TL) neighbors by using an eye-movement-contingent boundary change paradigm. In Experiment 1 readers received a parafoveal preview of a target word (e.g., "calm") that was either (1) identical to the target word ("calm"), (2) a TL-neighbor ("clam"), or (3) a…

This study investigates the impact of language on students' learning of mathematics. A comparison has been made between English and Korean speaking university students' discourses on "infinity". In Korean, unlike in English, there is a disconnection between colloquial and mathematical discourses on infinity, in that the mathematical word for…

Behavioral and emotional problems are highly prevalent in early childhood and represent an important focus of practice for clinical child and pediatric psychologists. Although psychological or psychiatric disorders are not typically diagnosed in children under the age of 2 years, recent research has demonstrated the appropriateness of assessing…

The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that word reading accuracy, not oral language, is associated with spelling performance in school-age children. We compared fourth grade spelling accuracy in children with specific language impairment (SLI), dyslexia or both (SLI/dyslexia) to their typically developing grade-matched peers.…

Objectives: This research aimed to identify incidents of mothers in Italy killing their own children and to test an adaptive evolutionary hypothesis to explain their occurrence. Methods: 110 cases of mothers killing 123 of their own offspring from 1976 to 2010 were analyzed. Each case was classified using 13 dichotomic variables. Descriptive…