Rater Comparability Scoring and Equating: Does Choice of Target Population Weights Matter in This Context?

When a constructed‐response test form is reused, raw scores from the two administrations of the form may not be comparable. The solution to this problem requires a rescoring, at the current administration, of examinee responses from the previous administration. The scores from this “rescoring” can be used as an anchor for equating. In this equating, the choice of weights for combining the samples to define the target population can be critical. In rescored data, the anchor usually correlates very strongly with the new form but only moderately with the reference form. This difference has a predictable impact: the equating results are most accurate when the target population is the reference form sample, least accurate when the target population is the new form sample, and somewhere in the middle when the new form and reference form samples are equally weighted in forming the target population.     

Racial Identity From Adolescence to Young Adulthood: Does Prior Neighborhood Experience Matter?

This study examined the influence of earlier neighborhood experiences on trajectories of racial centrality and regard among Black youth. Data were drawn from a sample of Black 11‐ to 14‐year‐old youth (N = 718) in the Maryland Adolescent Development in Context Study, a data set that permits the examination of structural and subjective neighborhood influences. Results suggest that centrality increases, whereas public regard remains relatively stable, across the transition to adulthood. Seventh graders who resided in neighborhoods in which adults were less willing to intervene or respond to problematic situations reported lower public regard in 11th grade. In addition, the trajectory of private regard varied according to the types of neighborhoods youth experienced in early adolescence.     

Does Dampened Physiological Reactivity Protect Youth in Aggressive Family Environments?

Is an attenuated physiological response to family conflict, seen in some youth exposed to early adversity, protective or problematic? A longitudinal study including 54 youth (average age 15.2 years) found that those with higher cumulative family aggression exposure showed lower cortisol output during a laboratory‐based conflict discussion with their parents, and were less likely to show the normative pattern of increased cortisol reactivity to a discussion they rated as more conflictual. Family aggression interacted with cortisol reactivity in predicting youth adjustment: Adolescents from more aggressive homes who were also more reactive to the discussion reported more posttraumatic stress symptoms and more antisocial behavior. These results suggest that attenuated reactivity may protect youth from the negative consequences associated with aggressive family environments.     

Vicarious Birth Experiences and Childbirth Fear: Does It Matter How Young Canadian Women Learn About Birth?

In our secondary analysis of a cross-sectional survey, we explored predictors of childbirth fear for young women (n = 2,676). Young women whose attitudes toward pregnancy and birth were shaped by the media were 1.5 times more likely to report childbirth fear. Three factors that were associated with reduced fear of birth were women’s confidence in reproductive knowledge, witnessing a birth, and learning about pregnancy and birth through friends. Offering age-appropriate birth education during primary and secondary education, as an alternative to mass-mediated information about birth, can be evaluated as an approach to reduce young women’s childbirth fear.     

How to Support Toddlers’ Autonomy: Socialization Practices Reported by Parents

Autonomy-supportive parenting is found to foster children’s adjustment but relatively few studies have been conducted with toddlers. In the present exploratory study, parents (N = 182) reported what practices they use when asking their toddlers (M age = 26.9 months) to engage in important yet uninteresting activities. Parents rated twenty-six potentially autonomy-supportive practices, along with a well-known scale measuring the extent to which they have a positive attitude towards autonomy support. Research Findings: Using correlational and factorial analyses, eight practices were identified: various ways to communicate empathy, providing developmentally appropriate rationales, describing the problem in an informational and neutral way, and modeling the requested behavior. This subset of autonomy-supportive practices for toddlers was positively related with toddlers’ rule internalization, providing them with further validity. Practice or Policy: These preliminary findings may be useful in guiding future conceptual, empirical, and applied work on the support of toddlers’ autonomy and its assessment in an emotionally-charged and challenging context.     

How Exactly Does Place Matter in Crime Analysis? Place,Space, and Spatial Heterogeneity

This article has four aims. First is to clarify the origins and different meanings of place, space, and other basic concepts in spatial analysis. The second aim is to reiterate the illogicality of the spatial homogeneity assumption in ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. An illustration of the comparison between traditional OLS and geographically weighted regression modeling is included for this purpose. The third aim is to explain that place matters in crime analysis not only when crime data are spatially clustered, but when relationships between correlates are found to be conditional upon place. The final aim is to convince criminology and criminal justice faculty to begin discussing the inclusion of spatial modeling as a compulsory topic in the curriculum.     

Student Learning Groups: Does Group Composition Matter?

There has been a shift in university teaching over the past decades to emphasize student achievement and persistence through high-impact practices and collaborative learning. While research supports the efficacy of these pedagogical strategies, it can be difficult to implement them on large campuses. Yet, many criminal justice professors assign students to work in small groups. This study, conducted at a university with a large underrepresented student population, found that the composition of student groups in one criminal justice class can affect the perceived benefits students receive in that class, in other classes, and in general. We found that students placed in a small group with classmates who shared some criminal justice classes reported more student-initiated collaborative learning, expanded support networks, and improved grades in shared courses compared to students in small groups with classmates who shared no classes. This simple intervention has the potential to mimic learning-communities with similar benefits.     

Gender and Performance in Mathematical Tasks: Does the Context Make a Difference?

This study investigates how the context of mathematical tasks affects the performance of young children (ages 5–11). Subjects were 523 children from age 5 to 11. Three contexts of mathematical tasks (stereotypically boys’ contexts, stereotypically girls’ contexts and neutral contexts) are examined in three age groups (young, medium, and old). Boys’ and girls’ mean scores were compared for each age group in each of the three contexts. The data show that girls’ performance is affected by the context of the task while boys’ performance is not. The comparison between boys and girls in the three different contexts showed that in neutral contexts, the scores of boys and girls are similar. In (stereotypically) boys’ contexts, however, boys score significantly higher than girls. In (stereotypically) girls’ contexts, a significant interaction is found between age and gender, showing that the way girls are affected by such contexts depends on their age. The implications of these findings for gender-fair mathematics learning are discussed.     

Student Death Penalty Attitudes: Does New Information Matter?

This study examines the effects of information about the death penalty on the attitudes of university students. Using an experimental design and a stratified cluster sampling procedure, this study addresses some of the limitations of previous research. Changes in death penalty attitudes at post-test were modest; however, it was also found that the degree of attitude change at post-test did not differ significantly between the experimental and control groups. The results of this study, in conjunction with the findings of previous studies of this nature, indicate that, while students tend to have limited knowledge of the death penalty, exposure to new information about it may not be sufficient to elicit change in their attitudes about the punishment.     

Comparability within Computer-Based Assessment: Does Screen Size Matter?

Due to increased use of computer-based assessments, comparability studies are moving beyond paper-and-pencil versus computer-based assessments to analyze variances with computers. It is therefore practically important to determine whether screen size and definition of the device affect students’ performance. Using data from a large school district giving tests on either Macs with large, high-definition screens or Chromebooks with standard 14-inch screens, this study compared assessment results between devices by grade, subject, and item type. Results showed no significant evidence supporting a large and high-definition screen’s positive impact on students’ performance. Likewise, there was no relationship between the impact of screen size and grade level as well as item types. Limitations and future studies were discussed.     

Does Spelling Still Matter—and If So,How Should It Be Taught? Perspectives from Contemporary and Historical Research

Educational Psychology Review - A century ago, spelling skills were highly valued and widely taught in schools using traditional methods, such as weekly lists, drill exercises, and low- and...     

Learners' Approaches to Solving Mathematical Tasks: Does Specialisation Matter?

This article emerged from an analysis of learners’ responses to a task presented to learners studying Mathematics and Mathematical Literacy (ML) in Gauteng, South Africa. Officially, Mathematics and ML are two separate learning areas. Learners from Grade 10 onwards are supposed to take either one or the other, but not both. This means that by Grade 11, learners would have acquired different kinds of knowledge and problem solving skills depending on which of these they take. The article demonstrates that this possibility may not necessarily happen. Grade 11 learners from both learning areas appeared to have acquired sufficient knowledge and skills and were able to solve similar Mathematics tasks in similar ways, with similar adequacy. We argue that, contrary to common perceptions in the field of Mathematics education (particularly in South Africa), engaging in ML does not and should not make one less mathematically advanced than engagement in pure Mathematics.     

Executive Compensation in Public Higher Education: Does Performance Matter?

Executive evaluation and compensation are central to organizational accountability and governance. Driven by increasing public demand on justifications and accountability for substantial salary increases for public university presidents, this paper is intended to shed light on the linkage between performance and executive compensation in public universities by examining the determinants of university presidents’ pay from 2004/2005 to 2008/2009 academic years. The central question is whether presidential compensation is related to a wide array of newly developed university performance measures or is independent of performance, i.e., university presidents are paid like bureaucrats in line with the widely supported conclusion in Jensen and Murphy (1990b) suggesting corporate CEOs are really paid like bureaucrats. Methodologically, Arellano–Bond dynamic panel model is applied to control for serial autocorrelation in the compensation data, i.e., university presidents’ pay in the current period is dependent to a great extent on that in the prior period. With extensive individual, institutional, and performance characteristics examined, it is concluded that performance related variables play a very limited role in determining public university presidents’ executive remuneration, when temporal autocorrelation is properly controlled, and presidential pay is strongly and persistently associated over time. The statistically insignificant pay-performance relationship together with the temporally persistent increases of presidential compensation may provide initial evidence supporting that public university presidents are paid like bureaucrats.     

How Does Motivation Develop and Why Does It Change? Reframing Motivation Research

In this article, we argue for a change in how researchers study motivation to learn. We believe that research can provide better explanations of the origins and outcomes of behavior, and thus be more useful, if we focus on how motivation develops and why it changes. We suggest reframing motivation research in education by extending the current focus on beliefs to studying the transactions among persons engaged in specific classroom activities over time. We present one approach from developmental psychology—Rogoff's three planes—that attempts to account for this transaction. We then present examples of current motivation research to illustrate how this approach has been applied. We believe that using this framework can produce new results that are meaningful for both researchers and practitioners who want to understand and foster motivation in education.     

Interrupting the Pathway From Discrimination to Black Adolescents’ Psychosocial Outcomes: The Contribution of Parental Racial Worries and Racial Socialization Competency

Racial discrimination can lead to psychosocial problems for Black adolescents, including internalization (e.g., depression) and externalization (e.g., conduct problems). Black parents (N = 186; M_age = 42.9) of adolescents (ages 10–18) were assessed to investigate how parental worries and racial socialization competency (i.e., confidence, skills, and stress) contribute to the association between parental discrimination experiences and their adolescents’ psychosocial problems. Mediation analyses indicated that the total direct models with discrimination, worries, and problems had good fit, and that the addition of worry mediated the discrimination-problems association. Furthermore, racial socialization competency moderated the association between worry and problems, wherein greater competency was associated with less impact of worry on problems. Findings illuminate potential intervention targets for buffering discrimination’s influence on adolescents’ psychosocial functioning.     

Does Teaching Experience Matter? The Beliefs and Practices of Beginning and Experienced Physics Teachers

This study utilized multiple data sources to examine the beliefs about learning and teaching physics and the instructional practices of five beginning teachers and seven experienced teachers from Singapore. Our study was implemented in the unique context of teachers teaching the topic of electricity to students grouped according to academic abilities. The topic of electricity is one of the most difficult physics topics for students to understand and for teachers to teach. It was found that the experienced teachers, compared to the beginning teachers, tended to have beliefs about teaching and learning physics that are closer to constructivist views. The majority of the teachers, particularly the beginning teachers, espoused beliefs about learning physics that were incongruent with their beliefs about teaching physics. Although transmission-oriented and teacher-directed practices dominated the classroom lessons of both groups of teachers, more elements of constructivist instruction were found in the classroom lessons of the experienced teachers. It was also found that the classroom practices of the teachers, especially those in their inductive years of teaching, were more aligned with their beliefs about learning physics than their beliefs about teaching physics.     

Does teacher professional development affect content and pedagogical knowledge: How much and for how long?

We examine the impact of teacher professional development on a key aspect of teacher quality—teacher knowledge. Specifically we use English Language Arts teacher content and pedagogy assessments to determine whether the California Professional Development Institutes significantly improve teacher content knowledge and whether teachers retain that knowledge six months after the institutes are completed. The results indicate that teachers vary significantly in pre-institute knowledge on the four assessed domains, that they demonstrate significant knowledge growth between the pre- and post-assessments, but that practical classroom experience hinders knowledge retention as measured six months later. Further, pre-exiting knowledge gaps are not systematically reduced thereby not alleviating the uneven distribution of teacher quality among California elementary schools.     

Getting Under the Hood: How and for Whom Does Increasing Course Structure Work?

At the college level, the effectiveness of active-learning interventions is typically measured at the broadest scales: the achievement or retention of all students in a course. Coarse-grained measures like these cannot inform instructors about an intervention''s relative effectiveness for the different student populations in their classrooms or about the proximate factors responsible for the observed changes in student achievement. In this study, we disaggregate student data by racial/ethnic groups and first-generation status to identify whether a particular intervention—increased course structure—works better for particular populations of students. We also explore possible factors that may mediate the observed changes in student achievement. We found that a “moderate-structure” intervention increased course performance for all student populations, but worked disproportionately well for black students—halving the black–white achievement gap—and first-generation students—closing the achievement gap with continuing-generation students. We also found that students consistently reported completing the assigned readings more frequently, spending more time studying for class, and feeling an increased sense of community in the moderate-structure course. These changes imply that increased course structure improves student achievement at least partially through increasing student use of distributed learning and creating a more interdependent classroom community.