Teaching Nature of Scientific Knowledge to Kindergarten Through University Students

Science & Education -     

Determining Sufficient Measurement Opportunities When Using Multiple Cut Scores

Many educational testing programs report examinee performance at more than two levels of proficiency. Whether these assessments have the capacity to support these multiple inferences, though, is a topic that has not been widely discussed. This study proposes a method for evaluating the minimum number of measurement opportunities for reporting students' performance at multiple achievement levels and describes an application of the method for reading and mathematics assessments that are used by some school districts in Nebraska. Analyses were based on judgments collected from 110 teachers about characteristics of items and tasks from multiple assessments in reading and mathematics at grades 4 and 8, and in high school. Results suggested that there were generally enough items on the mathematics assessments to classify students into two or three performance levels, but rarely enough to make the four classifications that the state reported. Items on the reading assessments were generally distributed across the proficiency levels and tended to allow reporting for all four classification levels. These findings have implications for both practitioners and policymakers in how scores are interpreted.     

GTravels towards Problem Based Learning in Medical Education (VPBL)

This paper reports the results and insights ofan exploratory investigation of theeffectiveness of a prototypic virtualproblem-based learning (VPBL) exercisedelivered via the WWW, that uses HypermediaAssisted Instructional Technologies (HAIT). The study targeted all first year medicalstudents at a south-central University Schoolof Medicine who were enrolled in the humanphysiology course during the Spring 2000 (n =150). A quasi-experimental, post-test onlyresearch design compared the VPBL and atext-based version of the same PBL exercise onstudents' achievement, as measured by a set ofselected physiology examination items, andtheir perceptions of the learning environment,as measured by the Teaching and LearningEnvironment Questionnaire (TLEQ) (Chauvin &Bowdish, 1998). Findings suggest that the VPBLis equally as effective as the text-basedversion for enhancing students' learning andtheir learning environment in small group, PBLsessions. In this paper, we examine theevidence supporting the VPBL innovation andexplore what constitutes necessary andsufficient evidence that an educationalinnovation should be incorporated appropriatelyinto the medical educational practice of aschool. We examine instructional design issuessuch as learner control, instructional control,and teacher and learner roles as related toinstructional development for the WWW, bycomparing and contrasting our observations ofthe VPBL design experiment with theprofessional literature.     

Correlations between WISC-R subtests and verbal,performance, and full scale IQ scores for minority group children

The relationship between WISC-R subtest scores and Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQs was investigated for a sample comprised of rural Appalachian children. The sample was comprised of both white and black children who might be described as culturally different by virtue of low family income and residence in the mountainous areas of Virginia and North Carolina. Data analysis consisted of computing product-moment correlations (rs) between each of the ten subtests and the Verbal, Performance, and Full Scale IQs. Correlations between individual subtests and the FS IQ ranged from.49 through.63, but none of the differences between these rs were large enough to attain significance. Correlations between the verbal subtests and Verbal IQ ranged from.64 for Comprehension up to.78 for Vocabulary. For the performance subtest, the rs ranged from.54 between Coding and the Performance IQ up to.72 for Object Assembly.