Trace Lines for Testlets: A Use of Multiple-Categorical-Response Models

It is not always convenient or appropriate to construct tests in which individual items are fungible. There are situations in which small clusters of items (testlets) are the units that are assembled to create a test. Using data from a test of reading comprehension constructed of four passages with several questions following each passage, we show that local independence fails at the level of the individual questions. The questions following each passage, however, constitute a testlet. We discuss the application to testlet scoring of some multiple-category models originally developed for individual items, In the example examined, the concurrent validity of the testlet scoring equaled or exceeded that of individual-item-level scoring     

‘Across the Divide’: Developing Professional Learning Ecosystems in STEM Education

Research in Science Education - This paper reports the findings from a cross-sector research project designed to question how the development of university-school partnerships can influence...     

What's so hard about teaching science?

Early Childhood Education Journal - Do you feel that science is sifficult to understand and hard to teach? Do you designate only a small amount of time for a science period? Are you afraid of the...     

Examining the Process and Outcome of Career Counseling for Different Types of Career Counseling Clients

Using cluster analysis, we identified two types of career counseling clients: (a) Clients with moderate levels of career-related distress, discomfort, and uncertainty and (b) clients with high levels of career concerns, personal distress, and stigma about career counseling. The more distressed group expressed lower evaluations of a career counseling session and perceived their counselors as providing fewer action-oriented counseling skills than the less distressed group. No differences emerged in terms of client's perceptions of the therapeutic relationship. The practical implications and limitations of these results are discussed.     

Contributions of Male and Female Guests and Hosts to Peer Group Entry

92 7–9-year-old children (47 girls) were observed while attempting to join 2 relatively unfamiliar same- or opposite-sex peers who were playing a board game. Female guests were less obtrusive than male guests in their entry approaches, whereas male guests were more active and assertive. Guests were less behaviorally constrained when approaching same- than opposite-sex hosts. Female hosts were more attentive to the guests than male hosts, who tended to ignore the newcomers. Successful guests received initiations from the hosts, responded contingently to host initiations, and performed activity-related behavior. Since female hosts initiated more behavior to the guests than male hosts, and female guests were more contingently responsive than male guests, girls entering female groups were the most successful. These findings support the thesis that peer group entry processes and outcomes are affected by the personal characteristics and contexts of both the entering children and their hosts.     

Intergenerational transmission of social anxiety: the role of social referencing processes in infancy

Responses to an unfamiliar adult were examined in infants of mothers with social phobia ( N = 79) and infants of nonanxious comparison mothers ( N = 77) at 10 and 14 months in a social referencing paradigm. On each occasion, a female stranger first interacted with the mother and then approached and interacted with the infant. Over time, infants of mothers with social phobia showed increasing avoidance of the stranger, particularly when they were behaviorally inhibited. In boys, maternal social phobia was associated with increasing fearful responses. Infant avoidance was predicted by expressed maternal anxiety and low levels of encouragement to interact with the stranger. The findings are discussed in relation to theories concerning the intergenerational transmission of social anxiety.     

Rural Neighborhood Context,Child Care Quality,and Relationship to Early Language Development

Research Findings: Prior research with older urban children indicates that a disadvantaged neighborhood context is associated with poorer early development, including poorer verbal ability, reading recognition, and achievement scores among children. Neighborhood disadvantage in rural communities and at younger age levels may also be related to development; however, this relationship has received little examination. In this study we utilized data from the Family Life Project, a representative sample of babies born to mothers in poor rural counties in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, to address questions related to the relationship between neighborhood context (disadvantage and safety) and children's early language development. We examined the mediation of this relationship by child care quality. We also examined geographic isolation and collective socialization as moderators of the relationship between neighborhood context and child care quality. Results indicated that although neighborhood disadvantage did not predict children's development or child care quality, neighborhood safety predicted children's receptive language, with child care quality a partial mediator of this relationship. Collective socialization but not geographic isolation moderated the relationship between neighborhood safety and child care quality. Practice or Policy: Implications for policy, practice, and future research are discussed, including improving community safety through community policing, neighborhood watch, and social networks and increasing access to quality child care.     

Reverberating chords: implications of storied nostalgia for borderland discourses in pre-service teacher identity

The research that is the subject of this paper set out to interrogate pre-service teachers’ responses to issues of national identity, ideology, and representation in contemporary multicultural Canadian picture books. While the research focused on whether and how the literature could serve to inform and broaden pre-service teachers’ conceptualizations of diversity, we retrospectively decided to re-visit the focus group and interview data to know which of the 70 picture books had most engaged the teachers and why. We critically consider the implications of teachers’ attachments for social justice education and teachers’ cultivation of a critical, ‘borderlands’ discourse aware of self and open to others. The research suggests that a significant source of teacher knowledge and thinking is lodged in teachers’ personal memories of childhood texts, called touchstones. Touchstones were a place from which teachers implicitly began; certain stories struck particular chords, chords largely attributable to childhood memories. Most intertextual connections were personal, with some tangential to the text. While touchstones performed different functions depending on the subject position of the pre-service teachers, they pointed to the existence of an underlying position of teacher as nostalgic subject. Given the importance of this subject position for teachers’ responses to picture books, we explore critical reconceptualizations of nostalgia that can support the development of borderland discourses. We suggest that pre-service teachers need to be invited to individually and collectively examine their responses to both old and new touchstone stories. More nuanced research also needs to be conducted on the role of nostalgia in teacher formation, how it influences teacher practice, and how to best design teacher education courses to foster ‘borderland discourses’ related to the storying of teacher identity, especially with respect to popular ‘collectibles’ and core teaching texts like picture books.