The study was conducted to investigate the relation of adolescent students' mathematics motivation and achievement to their appropriate help-seeking and inappropriate guessing behaviour while using instructional software. High school students (n = 90) completed brief assessments of mathematics motivation and then worked with software for geometry…

A series of 8 tests was administered to university students over 4 weeks for program assessment purposes. The stakes of these tests were low for students; they received course points based on test completion, not test performance. Tests were administered in a counterbalanced order across 2 administrations. Response time effort, a measure of the…

This is a book about quality and how to control quality through deliberate actions on the part of the professionals developing and implementing the instances of instruction available at an organization. Quality control theory favors no particular learning philosophy and is only directed towards aspects of how, what, where and when measurements are…

An alternative derivation is given for a generalization of the Rasch model which incorporates a guessing parameter. The probability of a correct response to the problem is a projective transformation of the problem difficulty. The ability and difficulty parameters separate into additive components. (Author/JKS)

Our research on learning enhancement has been focusing on the consequences for learning and forgetting of some of the more obvious and concrete choices that arise in instruction, including: How does spacing of practice affect retention of information over significant retention intervals (up to two years)? Do spacing effects generalize beyond…

This article will share results from research that investigated how sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students who had not been exposed to formal algebraic methods approached word problems of an algebraic nature. Student use of systematic guess and check, the predominate approach taken by these students, is the focus. The goal is to consider the…

Estimating ability parameters in latent trait models in general, and in the Rasch model in particular is almost always hampered by noise in the data. In this study several alternative formulations which attempt to deal with these problems without a reparameterization are tested through a Monte Carlo simulation. (Author/JKS)

The present article reports on a study investigating the interaction of a reading comprehension test with gender in a formal testing context and the performance of males and females on reading test items with regard to demands on strategy use. Participants were 187 (59 = female and 128 = male) international students ranging from 17 to 20 years of…

Intellectual ability is assessed with the Spot-the-Word (STW) test (A. Baddeley, H. Emslie, & I. Nimmo Smith, 1993) by asking respondents to identify a word in a word-nonword item pair. Results in moderate-sized samples suggest this ability is resistant to decline due to dementia. The authors used a 3-parameter item response theory model to…

The theory of projective transformation is applied to the Rasch model for representing test performances. (Author/RC)

Parameter estimation for Keats generalization of the Rasch model that takes account of guessing behavior is investigated. It is shown that no minimal sufficient statistics for the ability parameters independent of the difficulty parameters exist. (Author/JKS)

Item-discrimination indices are numbers calculated from test data that are used in assessing the effectiveness of individual test questions. This article asserts that the indices are so unreliable as to suggest that countless good questions may have been discarded over the years. It considers how the indices, and hence overall test reliability,…

In student assessment, teachers place the greatest weight on tests they have constructed themselves and have an equally great interest in the quality of those tests. To increase the validity of teacher-made tests, many item-writing rules-of-thumb are available in the literature, but few rules have been tested experimentally. In light of the…

An ability-based guessing model is formulated and applied to several data sets regarding educational tests in language and in mathematics. The formulation of the model is such that the probability of a correct guess does not only depend on the item but also on the ability of the individual, weighted with a general discrimination parameter. By so…