Easier Said Than Done: Rejoinder on Sijtsma and on Green and Yang

The main points of Sijtsma and Green and Yang in Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice (34, 4) are that reliability, internal consistency, and unidimensionality are distinct and that Cronbach's alpha may be problematic. Neither of these assertions are at odds with Davenport, Davison, Liou, and Love in the same issue. However, many authors in the testing community mention these terms not only together, but sometimes as if they are synonymous. Moreover, Cronbach's coefficient alpha is very popular as an index of reliability. Thus, articles discussing alpha are not only appropriate, but necessary. Our concerns are the same as formed the genesis of prior (2009) articles by these same authors, Sijtsma and Green and Yang. This rejoinder also makes comments about item parcels when tests are multidimensional and about factor analytic approaches to assessing reliability.     

Adaptive Instructional Strategies for Teaching Rules in Mathematics

These researchers explored ways of adapting instruction to individual students. In one experiment, as an incentive for focusing on more difficult learning tasks, they assigned more points to tasks predicted to be difficult for the student. In a second experiment, they varied both incentives and number of examples offered to demonstrate the tasks, again on the basis of pretest scores. Included is a discussion of how the findings-that both techniques are beneficial—can be applied in classroom instruction. The authors acknowledge the contribution of Duncan N. Hansen, who directed the research project involving performance of the present studies and participated in the writing of earlier drafts. Requests for reprints should be sent to Steven M. Ross, Foundations of Education, Memphis State University.