Minimizing the Influence of Item Parameter Estimation Errors in Test Development: A Comparison of Three Selection Procedures

In test development, item response theory (IRT) is a method to determine the amount of information that each item (i.e., item information function) and combination of items (i.e., test information function) provide in the estimation of an examinee's ability. Studies investigating the effects of item parameter estimation errors over a range of ability have demonstrated an overestimation of information when the most discriminating items are selected (i.e., item selection based on maximum information). In the present study, the authors examined the influence of item parameter estimation errors across 3 item selection methods—maximum no target, maximum target, and theta maximum—using the 2- and 3-parameter logistic IRT models. Tests created with the maximum no target and maximum target item selection procedures consistently overestimated the test information function. Conversely, tests created using the theta maximum item selection procedure yielded more consistent estimates of the test information function and, at times, underestimated the test information function. Implications for test development are discussed.     

“Standing in Terri Schiavo's Shoes”: The Role of Genre in End-of-Life Decision Making

This article reports the findings from analysis of end-of-life court cases and case files from one state public guardianship administrator as well as interviews with guardians or surrogates to identify how language and principles of the courts are operationalized in end-of-life decisions for those who are unable to make decisions for themselves. We found that physicians and guardians worked well within the requirements of the genre to ensure the best interests for those whom they represent.     

The Use of Collaboration,Authentic Learning,Linking Material to Personal Knowledge,and Technology in the Constructivist Classroom: Interviews with Community College Faculty Members

ABSTRACT

This study explored how faculty members implemented constructivist teaching methods after training. The student-centered teaching methods were interactions and collaborations, authentic learning and real-world experiences, linking material to previously learned information, and using technology in the classroom. Seven faculty members trained in student-centered teaching methods by the professional development department at a community college were interviewed. Interviews were supplemented with teacher-generated documents and classroom observations. All reported implementing the recommended practices in the classrooms, both online and in traditional face-to-face classrooms.     

Supervisors' conceptions of research and the implications for supervisor development

Teaching reform in higher education has frequently been informed by investigations into conceptions of learning held by students and by teachers. Such work has been extended into research education, with the study of experienced researchers' conceptions of research providing a basis for enquiry into the way research is experienced by the various participants in research education. This paper reports research designed to investigate research supervisors' conceptions of research as they were produced in focus group conversations. Using techniques of membership categorisation analysis, discourses are identified that privileged university‐based research and researchers over other forms of research and other ways of knowing, in particular over the interests of professional/practitioner researchers and over the legitimacy of research conducted in workplaces outside the university. It is argued that such discourses have the potential to be problematic for professional and industry‐based practitioner researchers as they seek to construct authoritative researcher identities. Further interrogation of the categorisation work that sustains these discourses offers the opportunity to make their assumptions explicit, which has implications for supervisors' reflective practice and professional development.     

Interpreting inclusivity: an endeavour of great proportions

Commencing with a historical account of how special needs education has informed the inclusivity debate, the authors consider the knotty problem of what is meant by inclusivity. An examination of the characteristics of inclusivity is then undertaken, and a functional school‐based inclusivity framework – a three‐faceted model – is proposed. The model commences with a philosophical underpinning designed to generate a number of emphases to be determined by the school. Once agreed upon, these are then operationalised for classroom practices. It is contended that the model is a defensible way of facilitating the development of an inclusivity ethos within the school milieu. Finally, impediments hampering the implementation are identified and discussed.     

Teachers’ Perceptions of their Mentoring Role in Three Different Clinical Settings: Student Teaching,Early Field Experiences,and Entry Year Teaching

The purpose of this study was to determine the differences in mentoring across three different clinical settings: student teaching, early field experiences, and entry year teachers. Eighteen teachers with mentoring experience in all three clinical settings were selected and interviewed. The teachers’ expectations for teacher development, mentoring relationships, and mentoring strategies differed across all three clinical settings. In addition, their confidence, their relationship with mentees, and their mentoring strategies were influenced by two features of the clinical setting: (a) the amount of time for mentoring interactions, and (b) the expectations for the mentee. To improve mentoring, the authors recommend (a) lengthening clinical experiences, (b) providing support for creating positive relationships, and (c) providing professional development specific to each of the three clinical settings.     

Trait self-esteem and claimed self-handicapping motives in sports situations

Abstract

We examined the relationship between physical self-esteem and claimed self-handicapping among athletes by taking motives into consideration. In Study 1, 99 athletes were asked to report their tendency to engage in claimed self-handicapping for self-protective and self-enhancement motives (trait measures). Low self-esteem athletes reported a higher tendency to engage in claimed self-handicapping for these two motives compared with high self-esteem athletes. Neither low nor high self-esteem athletes reported a preference for one motive over the other. In Study 2, 107 athletes participated in a test that was ostensibly designed to assess high physical abilities – and thus to encourage self-handicapping for self-enhancement motives (success-meaningful condition) – or to assess low physical abilities, and thus to encourage self-handicapping for self-protective motives (failure-meaningful condition). Before starting the test, athletes were given the opportunity to claim handicaps that could impair their performance. Low self-esteem athletes claimed more handicaps than high self-esteem athletes in both conditions. Findings suggest that low physical self-esteem athletes engage more in claimed handicapping regardless of motives, relative to high physical self-esteem athletes.     

Implications of task structure on self‐regulated learning and achievement

School tasks interact with student motivation, cognition, and instruction to influence learning and achievement. Heeding calls for additional research linking motivational and cognitive factors in learning and instruction on specific tasks within authentic classroom settings we quantitatively and qualitatively track 90 tenth‐grade science students’ motivation, reported use of learning strategies, achievement, calibration, and task perceptions as they engage in a well‐structured task (WST) and an ill‐structured task (IST). Students achieved higher grades on, and reported more ease and value for, the WST whereas they utilised critical thinking and peer learning strategies more on the IST. Lower academic achievers calibrated their achievement less accurately on each task and experienced lower grades, interest, ease, and management capability on the IST. Conversely, higher academic achieving students reported more self‐efficacy and effort regulation and lower anxiety and elaboration on the IST. Motivation – notably less intrinsic goal orientation in low academic achievers and higher task value and self‐efficacy – predicted performance on the IST. The structure of tasks may provide prompts that illicit unique self‐regulated learning responses in students.     

QCS: A system for querying, clustering and summarizing documents

Information retrieval systems consist of many complicated components. Research and development of such systems is often hampered by the difficulty in evaluating how each particular component would behave across multiple systems. We present a novel integrated information retrieval system—the Query, Cluster, Summarize (QCS) system—which is portable, modular, and permits experimentation with different instantiations of each of the constituent text analysis components. Most importantly, the combination of the three types of methods in the QCS design improves retrievals by providing users more focused information organized by topic.We demonstrate the improved performance by a series of experiments using standard test sets from the Document Understanding Conferences (DUC) as measured by the best known automatic metric for summarization system evaluation, ROUGE. Although the DUC data and evaluations were originally designed to test multidocument summarization, we developed a framework to extend it to the task of evaluation for each of the three components: query, clustering, and summarization. Under this framework, we then demonstrate that the QCS system (end-to-end) achieves performance as good as or better than the best summarization engines.Given a query, QCS retrieves relevant documents, separates the retrieved documents into topic clusters, and creates a single summary for each cluster. In the current implementation, Latent Semantic Indexing is used for retrieval, generalized spherical k-means is used for the document clustering, and a method coupling sentence “trimming” and a hidden Markov model, followed by a pivoted QR decomposition, is used to create a single extract summary for each cluster. The user interface is designed to provide access to detailed information in a compact and useful format.Our system demonstrates the feasibility of assembling an effective IR system from existing software libraries, the usefulness of the modularity of the design, and the value of this particular combination of modules.