Proper survey design is essential to obtain reliable, replicable data from research subjects. One threat to inferences drawn from surveys is anchoring-and-adjusting. Tversky and Kahnemann (1974) observed that participants' responses to questions depended systematically on irrelevant information they received prior to answering. It is important for…

Pragmatic competence is among the explicitly acknowledged sub-competences that make the communicative competence in any language (Bachman & Palmer, 1996; Council of Europe, 2001). Within the notion of pragmatic competence itself, "implicature (implied meanings)" comes to the fore as one of the five main areas there (Levinson, 1983).…

Few studies have explored the subjective mental health of adolescents with intellectual disabilities, while proxy ratings indicate an overrepresentation of mental health problems. The present study reports on the design and an initial empirical evaluation of the Well-being in Special Education Questionnaire (WellSEQ). Questions, response scales,…

Traditionally the measures used to evaluate the impact of an educational programme on student outcomes and the extent to which students change is a comparison of the student's pre-test scores with his/her post-test scores. However, this method of evaluating change may be problematic due to the confounding factor of response shift bias when student…

Purpose--The purpose of this research is to examine participants' response rate on dual style training course evaluation forms. These combine structured and open-ended formats. Pencil and paper forms have a long history of use by trainers in business and commerce and more recently in education. Research methods texts tend to have neglected the…

Suggests that when a students' response style is greatly skewed, the occupational scales reflect the pattern of the test construction. Correlating that pattern with students' actual profiles showed the common variance may average 35 percent when a predominance of one response reaches 60 percent. (JAC)

Inconsistent item-pair Variable Response Inconsistency (VRIN) and True Response Inconsistency (TRIN) scales were developed for the Jesness Inventory using 500 male and female delinquents to detect random and acquiescent sets. Specificities above 0.90 showed sensitivities up to 0.89 for VRIN and 0.85 and 0.62 for TRIN. Predictive power and overall…

Answer changes on tests are more likely to be made on items early in a group of questions, toward the end of a test, and on difficult items. The reasons for this student behavior are examined. (Editor/JD)

Discusses ways testing can help students learn if the teacher can remove the aura and function of evaluation from the experience. (GB)

The effect of preference for content of printed material and preference for study methods on comprehension was evaluated using 8th, 9th and 10th grade students. (Author/DEP)

Confidence weighting (CW) tends to improve the reliability of easy tests; the Coombs-type multiple-response (MR) option tends to improve the reliability of hard tests. It was hypothesized that, on a test of moderate difficulty, offering both the CW and MR response options would improve reliability more than either alone. Twenty-four subjects took…

Two studies compared multiple rank order and paired comparison methods in terms of psychometric characteristics and user reactions. Individual and group item responses, preference counts, and Thurstone normal transform scale values obtained by the multiple rank order method were found to be similar to those obtained by paired comparisons.…

Results were in close agreement with interference theory and the findings of paired-associate research. (Author)