Following a review of the literature on anomie and academic dishonesty at the university level, this paper reports on a survey of 300 undergraduate business students in Australia which found the newly developed measure both reliable and valid for measuring actual cheating and plagiarism. Concludes that universities need to foster development of an…

To help achieve national consistency of assessment and reporting in the Australian Vocational Education and Training sector, there is a need to develop a set of national principles for graded performance assessment. This paper challenges a number of prevailing principles from both a theoretical and assessment perspective, namely that grades must…

This manual describes the theory behind the Learning Process Questionnaire (LPQ) used in Australia and defines what the subscale and scale scores mean. The LPQ is a 36-item self-report questionnaire that yields scores on three basic motives for learning and three learning strategies, and on the approaches to learning that are formed by these…

The reliability and factorial validity of the Self Concept as a Learner Scale was studied, using 12-year-old Anglo-Australians. Reliability was acceptable for total scale and three subscales (task orientation, problem solving, and class membership), but not motivation. The validity of the factorial subscales was not confirmed. (GDC)

Describes development and use of the Course Experience Questionnaire to measure perceived teaching quality in higher education, and construction of a new generic teaching skills scale. Evaluation with large multidisciplinary samples in Australia confirmed reliability and validity of both short and long forms. Criterion and discriminant validity…

This article describes the Course Experience Questionnaire, a student evaluation of teaching performance. The article discusses the instrument's theoretical basis, statistical qualities, and national trials in Australian higher education. The questionnaire is seen to offer a reliable, verifiable, and useful means of evaluating teaching quality in…

Cognitive holding power is defined as a characteristic of the learning setting that presses students into different kinds of cognitive activity. Development of an instrument to measure cognitive holding power and studies of the instrument's reliability with over 1,500 Australian technical college students are reported. (SLD)

Individual differences in confidence judgments made by subjects on the accuracy of their answers to psychological test items were studied with 271 Australian college students. Findings suggest that confidence ratings, like the accuracy scores from the tests of human abilities, are stable and reliable measures of between-subjects variability. (SLD)

This article reports a study of the learning environments in computer networked classrooms. The study is unique in that it involved an evaluation of both the physical and psychosocial classroom environments in these computerised settings through the use of a combination of questionnaires and ergonomic evaluations. The study involved administering…

The issue of unfairness arises in high-stakes public examinations when students choose questions from alternatives that are offered and marks on the alternatives turn out to be discrepant. This paper addresses and defines unfairness and discrepancy in the context of alternative questions in Physics Tertiary Entrance Examinations (TEE) in Western…

This manual describes the theory behind the Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ) and explains what the subscale and scale scores mean. The SPQ is a 42-item self-report questionnaire used in Australia to assess the extent to which a tertiary student at a college or university endorses different approaches to learning and the motives and strategies…

The Rasch simple logistic model is used to examine the relative item parameter values of a personality inventory with respect to populations cross-classified by sex and country. While items conform to the model within each of the populations, half the items show significant discrepancies among the populations. (Author/RL)

Multifaceted Rasch analysis was used to determine whether bias was evident in the way a group of raters graded two different versions of an oral interaction test, undertaken by the same candidates. Results indicate that certain raters consistently rated the tape version of the test more harshly while others rated the live one more harshly. (10…

Results of 6 experiments with 109 Australian preschool children favor training in phoneme identity over segmentation as a component of initial reading instruction because it is easier to implement and its relation to alphabetic insight is stronger. Implications for the initial reading curriculum are discussed. (SLD)

The reliability of multiple choice tests--containing different numbers of response options--was investigated for 260 students enrolled in technical college economics courses. Four test forms, constructed from previously used four-option items, were administered, consisting of (1) 60 two-option items--two distractors randomly discarded; (2) 40…