In the so-called "post-truth" world, there exists widespread confusion and disagreement over what is known, how to know, and who to trust. Current education has largely failed to meet the challenges of this world. Grounded in a new analysis of the goals of epistemic education, we argue for new directions in instruction. Our analysis…

In today's market-driven educational culture, universities are coming under increasing pressure to justify funding through the disclosure of measurable outcomes in education and research. One educational objective that receives particular attention is critical thinking, regarded as an essential skill in both academic and work environments. The…

The University of Reading Learning Gain project is a three-year longitudinal project to test and evaluate a range of available methodologies and to draw conclusions on what might be the right combination of instruments for the measurement of Learning Gain in higher education. This paper analyses the validity of a measure of critical thinking…

Teacher education in universities continues to diversify in the twenty-first century. Just as course offerings, course delivery, staffing and the teaching/research mix varies extensively from university to university so does the procedure for pre-service teacher selection. Various factors bear on selection procedures and practices however few…

Studies of creative thinking skills have generally measured a single aspect of creativity, divergent thinking. A number of other processes involved in creative thought have been identified. Effective execution of these processes is held to depend on the strategies applied in process execution, or heuristics. In this article, we review prior…

The present research examined the reliability of three types of divergent thinking tasks (unusual uses, instances, consequences/implications) and two types of subjective scoring (an average across all responses vs. the responses people chose as their top-two responses) within a latent variable framework, using the maximal-reliability "H"…

This is the third of five papers detailing our national study of general education astronomy students' conceptual and reasoning difficulties with cosmology. In this paper, we use item response theory to analyze students' responses to three out of the four conceptual cosmology surveys we developed. The specific item response theory model we use is…

Objective: Pain assessment for nonverbal older adults with cognitive impairments or dementia presents many challenges, and it is important to determine which scales are most useful in assessing pain among this population. Method: In this review 11 observational scales for assessment of pain in older adults with dementia or cognitive impairments…

The present study examined the reliability and validity of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Fourth Edition (WISC-IV) for use with deaf and hard-of-hearing (D/HOH) children. Psychologists (n = 10) provided data for 128 D/HOH children who were assessed with the WISC-IV as part of routine assessments. All the WISC-IV subtests (8) and…

The Test of Logical Thinking (TOLT) and the Group Assessment of Logical Thinking (GALT) are two of the instruments most widely used by science educators and researchers to measure students' formal reasoning abilities. Based on Piaget's cognitive development theory, formal thinking ability has been shown to be essential for student achievement in…

Drawing from empirically based and theoretical literature in the field, this review examines Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and the accountability provisions found in Title One of the NCLB legislation. States have the ability to statistically manipulate their AYP implementation, which may give a false impression to the public that AYP is a…

Qualitative inquiry has gained importance in the evaluation of educational settings because it provides in-depth information, shedding light on context, situations, or processes. In this study, a qualitative inquiry was undertaken in order to evaluate a pedagogical course from the prospective teachers' points of view. In this case study, data were…

This article provides a review of Roberts-2, an individually administered narrative measure published by Western Psychological Services. Roberts-2 is a substantial revision of the earlier version of this measure, the Roberts Apperception Test for Children (RATC; McArthur & Roberts, 1982). Roberts-2 is composed of 16 stimulus cards that direct…

The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is a measure of how much students' critical thinking improves after attending college or university. This report illustrates how institutions can set their own standards on the CLA using a method that is appropriate for the CLA's unique characteristics. The authors examined evidence of reliability and…

This study compares five scoring approaches for a test of clinical reasoning skills. All of the approaches incorporate information about the correct item responses selected and the errors, such as selecting too many responses or selecting a response that is inappropriate and/or harmful to the patient. The approaches are combinations of theoretical…