A general approach for calculating the likelihood of dyadic interactions: Applications to sex preferences in rat pups and agonistic interactions in adults

We introduce a general approach for calculating the expected frequency of different types of dyadic interactions between animals and illustrate it with two applications. The first application determines whether there are sex contact biases between male and female Norway rat pups. We hypothesized that opposite-sex contact biases should be small, because it is likely that differences in contact based on the sex of animals would interfere with other biological functions, such as group temperature regulation. We found a small but significant bias of 3% in opposite-sex contacts. The second application reanalyzed J. B. Calhoun’s (1962) data on antagonistic encounters between rats for two factors (sex and birth location), each with two levels. The results of these two applications suggest that sex contact biases among pups are predictive of agonistic encounters among adults and that this approach has general application to the analysis of dyadic interactions among animals.     

The Adult Student and Course Satisfaction: What Matters Most?

Student satisfaction with a course is important because it can contribute to student retention, and it can also be used as one way to assess faculty effectiveness. This investigative work suggests that course satisfaction among non-traditional, adult students seeking business degrees is positively influenced by giving attention to four specific service-based factors. Based on feedback from 1,725 such students and 214 instructors at five institutions of higher education, a service-based model of course satisfaction is proposed. This model focuses on four manageable variables that are observed as influencing adult students’ satisfaction with a business course: relevancy of subject-matter, faculty subject-matter competency, faculty classroom management, and student workload.     

Academics' Motivation and Self‐efficacy for Teaching and Research

The study focused on academic staff in a post‐1987 university, that is, a former college of advanced education which had been awarded university status as a result of the Australian Government's decision to have a Unified National System of universities. The focus of attention was motivation and self‐efficacy for teaching and research. The effect of faculty of affiliation, level of appointment, gender, qualifications, and research productivity on staff's self‐reported attributions for teaching and research were examined. Tutors, staff with bachelor degrees, academics with low research productivity, and women had higher teaching motivation. One faculty was lower in both research motivation and self‐efficacy, and associate professors and professors had high levels of research efficacy. Men and women had the same level of research motivation and self‐efficacy. Staff with higher degrees and greater research productivity were more motivated and self‐efficacious about research. The results suggest the need to understand more clearly how each individual's research motivation and self‐efficacy is constructed and to determine the best method of increasing motivation and self‐efficacy for teaching and research.     

Rhetoric Versus Reality in Educational Reform: The Case of the National Science Foundation's Urban Systemic Initiative

In this paper, we present findings from a study assessing the impact of reforms on mathematics and science instruction to illustrate the multiple levels at which educational change must occur to promote student achievement and close achievement gaps. We undertake an analysis of the extent to which the rhetoric of national policy, in this case, the National Science Foundation's Urban Systemic Initiative, matches the realities of the day-to-day classroom practices we evaluated in our study. Addressed here is the problem of how applied anthropologists can broaden the scope of research and research findings from the edges of the societal mainstream to address larger policy issues. More globally, we discuss the influence of contemporary applied anthropologists and their colleagues who study marginalized groups on educational research.     

Reconsidering Reliability in Classroom Assessment and Grading

It is argued that classroom assessment evolves from a different set of issues and demands from more traditional measurement concerns and that approaches to reliability developed from traditional concerns are not appropriate for most classroom settings. The assessment and grading issues for high school instruction are examined from the perspective of reliability. An alternative conceptualization of reliability, sufficiency of information, is proposed and explored. This conceptualization is based on the argument that at a rudimentary level, reliability theory is based on the notion of having enough information to make decisions or draw inferences.     

The Effects of Inattentive Responding on Construct Validity Evidence When Measuring Social–Emotional Learning Competencies

Self‐report inventories are commonly administered to measure social‐emotional learning competencies related to college and career readiness. Inattentive responding can negatively impact the validity of interpreting individual results and the accuracy of construct validity evidence. This study applied nine methods of detecting insufficient effort responding (IER) to a social‐emotional learning assessment. Individual methods identified between 0.9% and 20.3% of respondents as potentially exhibiting IER. Removing flagged respondents from the data resulted in negligible or small improvements in criterion‐related validity, coefficient alpha, concurrent validity, and confirmatory factor analysis model‐data fit. Implications for future validity studies and the operational use of IER detection for social–emotional learning assessments are discussed.     

Heart Rate and Behavioral measures of Attention in Six-, Nine-, and Twelve-Month-Old Infants during Object Exploration

In this study we examined the effect of heart rate and behavioral measures of attention on distractibility of 6-, 9-, and 12-month-old infants. The infants were presented with a toy, and a distractor was presented while they attended to the toy. The distractor was presented during heart rate changes indicating sustained attention or attention termination, or during periods of time when behavioral ratings indicated the infant was in focused or casual attention. There were longer distraction latencies during attentional engagement as defined by heart rate changes or behavioral ratings than for periods of inattention. Infants had the longest distraction latencies when heart rate and behavior measures were congruent with respect to attention engagement (heart rate deceleration and focused attention). Conversely, latencies were shortes for congruent values of inattention (heart rate acceleration and casual attention). Infant information processing may be greatest when a heart rate deceleration occurs simultaneously with an episode of focused attention.     

Embedded Field Test Item Statistics: Can They Be Trusted for Estimating Student Proficiency?

Assessment items are commonly field tested prior to operational use to observe statistical item properties such as difficulty. Item parameter estimates from field testing may be used to assign scores via pre-equating or computer adaptive designs. This study examined differences between item difficulty estimates based on field test and operational data and the relationship of such differences to item position changes and student proficiency estimates. Item position effects were observed for 20 assessments, with items in later positions tending to be more difficult. Moreover, field test estimates of item difficulty were biased slightly upward, which may indicate examinee knowledge of which items were being field tested. Nevertheless, errors in field test item difficulty estimates had negligible impacts on student proficiency estimates for most assessments. Caution is still warranted when using field test statistics for scoring, and testing programs should conduct investigations to determine whether the effects on scoring are inconsequential.     

Testing the double-deficit hypothesis in an adult sample

The double-deficit hypothesis of dyslexia posits that reading deficits are more severe in individuals with weaknesses in phonological awareness and rapid naming than in individuals with deficits in only one of these reading composite skills. In this study, the hypothesis was tested in an adult sample as a model of reading achievement. Participants were parents of children referred for evaluation of reading difficulties. Approximately half of all participants reported difficulty learning to read in childhood and a small subset demonstrated ongoing weaknesses in reading. Structural equation modeling results suggest that the double-deficit hypothesis is an accurate model for understanding adult reading achievement. Better reading achievement was associated with better phonological awareness and faster rapid automatized naming in adults. Posthoc analyses indicated that individuals with double deficits had significantly lower reading achievement than individuals with single deficits or no deficits.