Meeting the NRC Panel's Recommendations: Commentary on the Papers by Mislevy and Haertel, Gorin, and Abedi and Gándara

In this commentary, we summarize some of the main themes of the NRC report and note ways in which the papers by Mislevy and Haertel, Gorin, and Abedi and Gándara address the Panel's recommendations. We then briefly review and offer reflections on each paper. We see much to applaud here and also in the broader effort to build bridges between the cognitive and measurement sciences. However, much work remains, not only in building bridges, be also in educating the next generation of psychometricians about cognition and the next generation of teachers about psychometrics. Until that day, even the best work here will have little impact on the business of large-scale assessment.     

Toddlers' prosocial behavior: from instrumental to empathic to altruistic helping

The study explored how the meaning of prosocial behavior changes over toddlerhood. Sixty-five 18- and 30-month-olds could help an adult in 3 contexts: instrumental (action based), empathic (emotion based), and altruistic (costly). Children at both ages helped readily in instrumental tasks. For 18-month-olds, empathic helping was significantly more difficult than instrumental helping and required greater communication from the adult about her needs. Altruistic helping, which involved giving up an object of the child's own, was the most difficult for children at both ages. Findings suggest that over the 2nd year of life, prosocial behavior develops from relying on action understanding and explicit communications to understanding others' emotions from subtle cues. Developmental trajectories of social-cognitive and motivational components of early helping are discussed.     

Camila,the earth,and the sun: Constructing an idea as shared intellectual property

Recent research has challenged traditional assumptions that scientific practice and knowledge are essentially individual accomplishments, highlighting instead the social nature of scientific practices, and the co‐construction of scientific knowledge. Similarly, new research paradigms for studying learning go beyond focusing on what is “in the head” of individual students, to study collective practices, distributed cognition, and emergent understandings of groups. These developments require new tools for assessing what it means to learn to “think like a scientist.” Toward this goal, the present case study analyzes the discourse of a 6th‐grade class discussing one student's explanation for seasonal variations in daylight hours. The analysis identifies discourse moves that map to disciplinary practices of the social construction of science knowledge, including (1) beginning an explanation by reviewing the community's shared assumptions; (2) referencing peers' work as warrants for an argument; and (3) building from isolated ideas, attributed to individuals, toward a coherent situation model, attributed to the community. The study then identifies discourse moves through which the proposed explanation was taken up and developed by the group, including (4) using multiple shared representations; (5) leveraging peers' language to clarify ideas; and (6) negotiating language and representations for new, shared explanations. Implications of this case for rethinking instruction, assessment, and classroom research are explored. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 47:619–642, 2010     

Visualizing Culturally Relevant Science Pedagogy Through Photonarratives of Black Middle School Teachers

This study situated in a Southern resegregated Black middle school involved four Black teachers and two White science educators’ use of photonarratives to envision culturally relevant science pedagogy. Two questions guided the study: (1) What community referents are important for conceptualizing culturally relevant practices in Black science classrooms? and (2) How do teachers’ photonarratives serve to open conversations and notions of culturally relevant science practices? The research methodologically drew upon memory-work, Black feminism, critical theory, visual methodology, and narrative inquiry as “portraiture.” Issues of positionality and identity proved to be central to this work, as three luminaries portray Black teachers’ insights about supports and barriers to teaching and learning science. The community referents identified were associated with church and its oral traditions, inequities of the market place in meeting their basic human needs, and community spaces.     

Proctored Versus Unproctored Online Exams: Studying the Impact of Exam Environment on Student Performance

Increasing numbers of universities are offering courses in online and hybrid formats. One challenge in online assessment is the maintenance of academic integrity. We present a thorough statistical analysis to uncover differences in student performance when online exams are administered in a proctored environment (i.e., in class) versus an unproctored environment (i.e., offsite). Controlling for student grade point average (GPA), no significant differences in mean overall course performance or exam performance between the two groups were found, nor were there any differences in the mean vectors of individual exam scores. The study reveals that the group taking online exams in the unproctored environment has significantly more variation in their performance results. In examining potential causes of the greater variation, analyses were performed to assess whether an increased level of possible cheating behavior could be observed from performance results for students in the unproctored section. No evidence of cheating behavior was found.     

Differences between peer victimization in cyber and physical settings and associated psychosocial adjustment in early adolescence

The increasing use of cyberspace as a social networking forum creates a new medium for youth to become victims of peer aggression. This study used factor analysis techniques to confirm whether survey questions about frequency of cyber victimization formed a distinct latent construct from questions about relational and overt victimization information in a large (N = 1,665) sample of middle school students. A secondary goal was to relate experiences of cyber victimization to symptoms of depression and social anxiety. Results indicate that cyber victimization is separate latent factor from overt and relational victimization. Experiences of cyber victimization were weakly associated with symptoms of social anxiety, but not depression. These results signify that cyber victimization deserves future empirical and clinical attention. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Writing in the library: Exploring tighter integration of digital library use with the writing process

Information provision via digital libraries often separates the writing process from that of information searching. In this paper we investigate the potential of a tighter integration between searching for information in digital libraries and using those results in academic writing. We consider whether it may sometimes be advantageous to encourage searching while writing instead of the more conventional approach of searching first and then writing. The provision of ambient search is explored, taking the user’s ongoing writing as a source for the generation of search terms used to provide possibly useful results. A rapid prototyping approach exploiting web services was used as a way to explore the design space and to have working demonstrations that can provoke reactions, design suggestions and discussions about desirable functionalities and interfaces. This design process and some preliminary user studies are described. The results of these studies lead to a consideration of issues arising in exploring this design space, including handling irrelevant results and the particular challenges of evaluation.