Intuitive conceptions based on cognitive biases (teleology, anthropomorphism, and essentialism) often prove helpful in everyday life while simultaneously being problematic in scientific contexts. Nonetheless, students often have intuitive conceptions of scientific topics such as evolution. As potential approaches to enable students to…

We provide evidence of validity for a newly developed diagnostic competence model of operation sense, by both (a) describing the theoretically substantiated development of the competence model in close association with its use within a large-scale formative assessment and (b) providing empirical evidence for the theoretically described cognitive…

Criterion-referenced measures, such as those used in the assessment of crime and violence, prioritize predictive accuracy (discrimination) at the expense of construct validity. In this article, we compared the discrimination and incremental validity of three commonly used criterion-referenced measures for sex offenders (Rapid Risk Assessment for…

This report has a simple aim: to present results from international assessments so readers can judge for themselves how American students stack up globally. It's intended to be a stand-alone supplement to the "Education Olympics" web event held between August 8th and August 22nd, 2008 (see edolympics.net). It shows how the U.S. has…

This article investigates justice judgments concerning grading. In two studies with secondary students (N[subscript 1]=350 academic-track students; N[subscript 2]=225 intermediate [n=81] and academic-track students [n=144]) attending the 7th to the 12th grade level, participants were presented with vignettes describing three different grading…