A learning style inventory and keyboarding pre/posttest administered to 48 fourth graders showed persistence to be the only learning style factor related to achievement. Pretest score was related to final achievement, indicating that natural kinesthetic ability may affect keyboarding speed. (SK)

Elementary school children's evaluations of peer tutoring were compared with their evaluations of the traditional practice of solitary work on tests to determine their conceptions of fair practices in testing and learning situations. Findings support the conclusion that children's understanding of different types of situations is reflected in…

Five experiments involving a total of 268 college students indicate that people are especially likely to overinfer quantity or probability from numerosity when they are asked to make inherently difficult judgments, when they are asked to render judgments while performing a concurrent task, and when they are forced to make rapid judgments. (SLD)

Although recent educational reforms have called for different types of assessments with more relaxed time requirements, the revised Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) allows less than one minute per verbal and math problem. According to an SAT tutor who took the new exam along with his students, the new test is unnecessarily tricky and should…

The present study examined the comparability of 4 alternate forms of the Digit Symbol Substitution test and the Symbol Digit Modalities (written) test, including the original versions. Male contact-sport athletes (N=112) were assessed on 1 of the 4 forms of each test. Reasonable alternate form comparability was demonstrated through establishing…

This study examined operational data from the SAT Reasoning Test™ to determine if students who tested under extended-time conditions were suffering from excessive fatigue relative to students who tested under standard-time conditions. Excessive fatigue was defined by significant (a) increases in differential item functioning (DIF) and (b)…

When running out of time on a multiple-choice test, some examinees are likely to respond rapidly to the remaining unanswered items in an attempt to get some items right by chance. Because these responses will tend to be incorrect, the presence of "rapid-guessing behavior" could cause these items to appear to be more difficult than they…

Since the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III) was published in 1991, it has been reported that fewer students are qualifying for gifted programs that use the WISC-III as a criterion measure. WISC-III differs from the WISC-Revised (WISC-R) in having a greater emphasis on speed of response, which could…

This study demonstrates the utility of a HYBRID psychometric model, which incorporates both item response theoretic and latent class models, for detecting test speededness. The model isolates where in a sequence of test items examinee response patterns shift from one providing reasonable estimates of ability to those best characterized by a random…

An experiment involving 20 graduate and undergraduate students (7 males and 13 females) at West Virginia University (Morgantown) assessed "fan network structures" of recognition memory. A fan in network memory structure occurs when several facts are connected into a single node (concept). The more links from that concept to various…

Based on the classic test-wiseness principles of J. Millman, C. H. Bishop, and R. Ebel, the STAR strategy streamlines the taking of timed tests. Before explaining the strategy to students, the instructor can convince students of the advantages of the strategy by administering a short test to determine students' test-wiseness. The STAR strategy…

Incentive, practice, instruction, and feedback were manipulated in a series of four 2 x 2 factorial studies, with Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps cadets and graduate students in education, to determine the individual and combined effects of these variables on learner performance (both speed and accuracy) of an aircraft comprehension task.…

Internals, but not externals, used time in a manner systematically related to item difficulty. These differences in time utilization may explain why the sense of control variable, although unrelated to ability, is a predictor of achievement test scores. (Authors/CB)

Suggests that shortening the time required for administering a reading test might provide more useful screening, diagnostic and predictive information for students of diverse abilities. Bibliography. (MD)