Investigating the Effect of Different Selected-response Item Formats for Reading Comprehension     

Anthony Becker  Tatiana Nekrasova-Beker 《Educational Assessment》2018,23(4):296-317

While previous research has identified numerous factors that contribute to item difficulty, studies involving large-scale reading tests have provided mixed results. This study examined five selected-response item types used to measure reading comprehension in the Pearson Test of English Academic: a) multiple-choice (choose one answer), b) multiple-choice (choose multiple answers), c) re-order paragraphs, d) reading (fill-in-the-blanks), and e) reading and writing (fill-in-the-blanks). Utilizing a multiple regression approach, the criterion measure consisted of item difficulty scores for 172 items. 18 passage, passage-question, and response-format variables served as predictors. Overall, four significant predictors were identified for the entire group (i.e., sentence length, falsifiable distractors, number of correct options, and abstractness of information requested) and five variables were found to be significant for high-performing readers (including the four listed above and passage coherence); only the number of falsifiable distractors was a significant predictor for low-performing readers. Implications for assessing reading comprehension are discussed.  相似文献   

Editor's note     

Joseph Becker 《The Information Society》2013,29(4)

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The disenchantments of educational TV     

John Mercer  Sam Becker 《Educational technology research and development : ETR & D》1955,3(3):173-182

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Kooperationsbereit oder Innovationsgegner?     

Susanne Böse  Marko Neumann  Michael Becker  Kai Maaz  Jürgen Baumert 《Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft》2018,21(6):1157-1186

The issue of implementing large-scale reforms has played an important role both in the past as well as in current debates on structural changes and quality measures in education. When putting reforms into practice, individual schools and their leaders, who take a key role in reform processes, are focused. In the context of a comprehensive school reform in Berlin, this contribution presents an implementation of the Stages of Concern Questionnaire (SoCQ, Hall and Hord 2011), which intends to assess the degree of participants’ engagement with innovations in a phased respectively stepwise approach. Recently, the SoCQ questionnaire has been used to build different profiles or types of engagement in reform. Based on N?=?196 school leaders, latent profile analyses thus served to identify five types of profiles. Altogether, they indicate that the majority of school leaders are ready to implement the reform and contribute to its optimization. A rather small group remained skeptical with regard to the school reform. With respect to individual leadership characteristics, differences in profile composition could be found for gender, school type, and professional experience.  相似文献   

Molecular thermodynamics for cell biology as taught with boxes     

Mayorga LS  López MJ  Becker WM 《CBE life sciences education》2012,11(1):31-38

Thermodynamic principles are basic to an understanding of the complex fluxes of energy and information required to keep cells alive. These microscopic machines are nonequilibrium systems at the micron scale that are maintained in pseudo-steady-state conditions by very sophisticated processes. Therefore, several nonstandard concepts need to be taught to rationalize why these very ordered systems proliferate actively all over our planet in seeming contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics. We propose a model consisting of boxes with different shapes that contain small balls that are in constant motion due to a stream of air blowing from below. This is a simple macroscopic system that can be easily visualized by students and that can be understood as mimicking the behavior of a set of molecules exchanging energy. With such boxes, the basic concepts of entropy, enthalpy, and free energy can be taught while reinforcing a molecular understanding of the concepts and stressing the stochastic nature of the thermodynamic laws. In addition, time-related concepts, such as reaction rates and activation energy, can be readily visualized. Moreover, the boxes provide an intuitive way to introduce the role in cellular organization of "information" and Maxwell's demons operating under nonequilibrium conditions.  相似文献   

The Critical Thinking Analytic Rubric (CTAR): Investigating intra-rater and inter-rater reliability of a scoring mechanism for critical thinking performance assessments     

Emily Saxton  Secret Belanger  William Becker 《Assessing Writing》2012,17(4):251-270

The purpose of this study was to investigate the intra-rater and inter-rater reliability of the Critical Thinking Analytic Rubric (CTAR). The CTAR is composed of 6 rubric categories: interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, explanation, and disposition. To investigate inter-rater reliability, two trained raters scored four sets of performance-based student work samples derived from a pilot study and subsequent larger study. The two raters also blindly scored a subset of student work samples a second time to investigate intra-rater reliability. Participants in this study were high school seniors enrolled in a college preparation course. Both raters showed acceptable levels of intra-rater reliability (α ≥ 0.70) in five of the six rubric categories. One rater showed poor consistency (α = 0.56) for the analysis category of the rubric, while the other rater showed excellent consistency (α = 0.91) for the same category suggesting the need for further training of the former rater. The results of the inter-rater reliability investigation demonstrate acceptable levels of consistency (α ≥ 0.70) in all rubric categories. This investigation demonstrated that the CTAR can be used by raters to score student work samples in a consistent manner.  相似文献   

Comedy Types and Political Campaigns: The Differential Influence of Other-Directed Hostile Humor and Self-Ridicule on Candidate Evaluations     

Amy B. Becker 《Mass Communication and Society》2013,16(6):791-812

The current study assesses the effect of exposure to diverse comedy types, measuring the differential impact of other-directed hostile humor and self-ridicule on feelings toward John McCain. Specifically, the analyses use experimental data collected in 2009 to compare the differential impact of viewing a video clip of John McCain's playful self-satire on Saturday Night Live with the effects of exposure to the more aggressive, judgmental, other-directed hostile humor of Stephen Colbert. The results suggest that viewers cool toward McCain after exposure to Stephen Colbert's other-directed hostile humor. Additional analyses show that the effect of exposure to varied types of political humor is direct and relatively impervious to moderation by political partisanship. Implications of the findings and their ability to help researchers understand the differential influence of varied comedy message types on political evaluations and attitudes is discussed.  相似文献   

Communicating the Impact of Free Access to Computers and the Internet in Public Libraries: A Mixed Methods Approach to Developing Outcome Indicators     

Samantha Becker  Michael D. Crandall  Karen E. Fisher 《Public Library Quarterly》2013,32(2):109-119

The U.S. IMPACT studies have two research projects underway that employ a mixed method research design to develop and validate performance indicators related specifically to the outcomes of public access computing (PAC) use in public libraries. Through the use of a nationwide telephone survey (n = 1130), four case studies, and a nationwide Internet survey of PAC users administered through 636 public libraries, this approach will generate generalizable quantitative data on the extent and distribution of the use of public access computing resources, as well as provide rich contextual data that will help understand how people use the computers and Internet connections in public libraries and the impact it has on their lives.  相似文献   

Subject Guides 2.0: A Look at LibGuides and Jing     

Bernd W. Becker 《Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian》2013,32(4):206-209

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Digital Learning Object Repositories     

Bernd W. Becker 《Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian》2013,32(1):86-88

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