We conducted a pilot study that used kernel-level packet capture to record the web pages visited by college students and the reading difficulty of those pages. Our results indicate that i) no students were fully compliant in their participation, ii) the number of texts encountered by participants was highly skewed, iii) the reading difficulty of…

Neural networks are ubiquitous in applied machine learning for education. Their pervasive success in predictive performance comes alongside a severe weakness, the lack of explainability of their decisions, especially relevant in humancentric fields. We implement five state-of-the-art methodologies for explaining black-box machine learning models…

Building and especially improving a classification kernel represents a challenging task. The works presented in this paper continue an already developed semi-supervised classification approach that aimed at labelling transcripts from educational videos. We questioned whether the size of the ground-truth data-set (Wikipedia articles) or the quality…

Nonparametric, or kernel, estimation of item response curve (IRC) is a concern theoretically and operationally. Accuracy of this estimation, often used in item analysis in testing programs, is biased when the observed scores are used as the regressor because the observed scores are contaminated by measurement error. In this study, we investigate…

This paper discusses the need for new model and approach to solve the problem of illiteracy of the most backward section of the society-women among scheduled and other backward classes. The empirical support for the study is testing, interview and observation conducted on the present status of 100 from among 1,500 adult learners who attended a…

The kernel of the Angoff method of standard setting (W. Angoff, 1971) would seem to be the judgment of whether a minimally competent person could answer an item on a test correctly or not. So it would seem that any procedure that requires independent judgment of the correctness or incorrectness of a response to items for a minimally acceptable…

A study used structuration theory to examine the climate of a school prior to a teachers' strike and explored the theory's value and explanatory power. The school is an older, established elementary school in a small town which borders on a major metropolitan area in the midwest. Data (collected over several weeks during school district…

CATSIB is a differential item functioning (DIF) assessment methodology for computerized adaptive test (CAT) data. Kernel smoothing (KS) is a technique for nonparametric estimation of item response functions. In this study an attempt has been made to develop a more efficient DIF procedure for CAT data, KS-CATSIB, by combining CATSIB with kernel…

This study compared five density estimation techniques applied to samples from a population of 272,244 examinees' ACT English Usage and Mathematics Usage raw scores. Unsmoothed frequencies, kernel method, negative hypergeometric, four-parameter beta compound binomial, and Cureton-Tukey methods were applied to 500 replications of random samples of…

This study explored the effects of external anchor test length on final equating results of several equating methods, including equipercentile (frequency estimation), chained equipercentile, kernel equating (KE) poststratification PSE with optimal bandwidths, and KE PSE linear (large bandwidths) when using the nonequivalent groups anchor test…

Summarized were eight studies comparing aspects of sentence comprehension skills in normal and learning disabled (LD) children. Questions such as the following were posed: Does the transformation of kernel sentences to passive negative questions affect sentence comprehension? Does the amount of feedback affect the level of sentence comprehension?…

Current research in reading indicates that what the reader brings to the printed page is far more important to comprehension than the information appearing there. This paper presents a model of how the integration of reading and writing skills can be undertaken, thereby strengthening both skill areas. With selections from a literary text and a…

Intended to give basic students simultaneous practice in reading and writing with an emphasis on accuracy, conciseness, and precision, the "finding the beef" method centers itself on summaries of news events. The first step of the method is to supply students with the appropriate data blocks based on news events, preferably those…

Writing samples as diagnostic measurement tools have many variables that the instructor must control--time is a factor, and often the instructor needs more than one sample to fairly evaluate student writing ability. One method for better predicting the exact nature of students' writing problems is sentence combining. For sentence combining to be…

Sentence combining is one kind of practice activity, quite specific in character, aimed at teaching syntactic fluency and judgment and the use of the devices of cohesion. Students can be led through the revision process step by step by converting the odd essay from real writing to a practice exercise, then actually providing the content needed for…