There is a growing public concern in Kenya over the persistent gap between those schools that are consistently ranked at the top and those ranked at the bottom of the annual Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) examination league tables. This has raised the issue of inequality in educational opportunity. Our primary concern in this paper…

The use of current adaptive behavior measures in practice and research is limited by their length and need for a professional interviewer. There is a need for alternative measures that more efficiently assess adaptive behavior in children and youth with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). The Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory-Computer…

Job attitudes and subjective well-being (SWB) have important relationships with one another. Moreover, job attitudes and, to an extent, SWB are related to chronological age. Owing to a "graying" workforce in industrialized countries, uncovering how age influences job attitudes is increasingly important. The present work explores the effects of…

Using data from the National Center for Educational Statistics research spanning fifteen years, researchers examined the impact of national educational policy implementation on the role of social studies in elementary schools. Specifically, with the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2007 and the continuation of federal-mandated…

Purpose: Self- and peer assessment has proved effective in promoting the development of teamwork and other professional skills in undergraduate students. However, in previous research approximately 30 percent of students reported that its use produced no perceived improvement in their teamwork experience. It was hypothesised that a significant…

Although the Angoff procedure is among the most widely used standard setting procedures for tests comprising multiple-choice items, research has shown that subject matter experts have considerable difficulty accurately making the required judgments in the absence of examinee performance data. Some authors have viewed the need to provide…

Increasingly, teacher educators recommend authentic, performance-related measures for evaluating teacher candidates. Nevertheless, more states are requiring teachers to pass high-stakes, minimum-competency exams. This study examined the relation between teacher candidate scores on authentic measures and their scores on certification exams required…

The current study hypothesized that (1) hope would negatively predict burdensomeness, thwarted belongingness, and acquired capability to enact lethal injury; (2) hope would negatively predict suicidal ideation; and (3) the interpersonal suicide risk factors would predict suicidal ideation. Results indicated that hope negatively predicted…

Career literature has been discussing the decline of the traditional career. Despite this debate, systematic information on the prevalence of contemporary career types is lacking. Two studies with large samples of employees aimed to determine types of career orientation, to explore their prevalence, and to validate these types by testing…

When 2 targets are embedded in a rapid serial visual presentation stream of distractors, perception of the second target is impaired when the intertarget lag is relatively short (less than 500 ms). Stimuli concurrently presented with the stream can affect this phenomenon, which is called attentional blink (AB). Previous studies have yielded…

The author's school is a founding member of the Association of College Counselors in Independent Schools, which includes all sorts of institutions--some in highly affluent communities, others with vastly more socioeconomically diverse populations, and some with strong percentages of international students. Individual members' approaches to…

Learning about statistics is a lot like learning about science: the learning is more meaningful if you can actively explore. This second installment of "Explorations in Statistics" delves into test statistics and P values, two concepts fundamental to the test of a scientific null hypothesis. The essence of a test statistic is that it compares what…

In this study, we investigate the logistic regression (LR), Mantel-Haenszel (MH), and Breslow-Day (BD) procedures for the simultaneous detection of both uniform and nonuniform differential item functioning (DIF). A simulation study was used to assess and compare the Type I error rate and power of a combined decision rule (CDR), which assesses DIF…

We wanted to test the hypothesis that neuropsychiatric disorder (NPD) with language impairment (LI) is a more severe variant of NPD than NPD without LI, and that this variant can be easily picked up by a non-word repetition (NWR) task. We therefore tested 56 (mean 7.6, range 6.1-9.5 years) children divided into three subgroups: one with LI only (n…

Null hypotheses are simple, precise, and theoretically important. Conventional statistical analysis cannot support them; Bayesian analysis can. The challenge in a Bayesian analysis is to formulate a suitably vague alternative, because the vaguer the alternative is (the more it spreads out the unit mass of prior probability), the more the null is…