Elementary school teachers\u27 opinions regarding the purposes and interpretation of score reports from standardized achievement test batteries.

Elementary school teachers serve a key role in the use and interpretation of standardized achievement test batteries (SATBs). If this role is to be properly exercised, teachers must be willing and able to use score information from such tests. Evidence suggests that teachers may not be skilled in making the interpretations that psychometricians intend from SATB score reports. To learn what purposes teachers believe SATB score reports appropriately serve, and what contents and formats teachers find useful in these reports, a survey research study was conducted. A questionnaire was administered to a sample of 671 elementary school teachers from Texas, Illinois, and Massachusetts, focusing on the purposes of SATB score reports in general, the purposes of specific formats and types of score reports presented in the questionnaire, and interpretations of the sample score reports. Background information about the respondents was gathered. Of particular interest was the amount of testing-related training they had experienced. A relationship between amount of testing-related training and teachers\u27 opinions and interpretations of test score reports was hypothesized. Respondents generally approved of the use of SATB score reports for certain purposes, especially those that had no permanent consequences for students and no external evaluative implications for the classroom. Teachers disapproved of the use of SATB score reports for student grading, promotion/retention decisions, and teacher evaluation. Other proposed uses were moderately approved. Respondents were equally supportive of numerical and graphical formats for a class-level report, but strongly preferred a numerical/pictorial version of an individual student score report (i.e., displaying subscores as sets of confidence bands) to a narrative version. Teachers\u27 interpretations of score reports generally did not agree with strict psychometric interpretations. This lack of a psychometric perspective was found regardless of the amount of training in testing issues the respondents had experienced. The author concludes with recommendations for action regarding the design of score reports to meet teachers\u27 needs and psychometricians\u27 intentions more effectively, the training of teachers to match their professional demands, and further exploration of this topic through qualitative research methods

A Compound Comminuted Fracture in an Arabian Stallion

On Nov. 3, 1952, a 6-year-old Arabian stallion, Iben Fadl, was admitted to the Stange Memorial Clinic with a history of fracturing the left front leg the previous day

Phase transition of the susceptible-infected-susceptible dynamics on time-varying configuration model networks

We present a degree-based theoretical framework to study the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) dynamics on time-varying (rewired) configuration model networks. Using this framework, we provide a detailed analysis of the stationary state that covers, for a given structure, every dynamic regimes easily tuned by the rewiring rate. This analysis is suitable for the characterization of the phase transition and leads to three main contributions. (i) We obtain a self-consistent expression for the absorbing-state threshold, able to capture both collective and hub activation. (ii) We recover the predictions of a number of existing approaches as limiting cases of our analysis, providing thereby a unifying point of view for the SIS dynamics on random networks. (iii) We reinterpret the concept of hub-dominated phase transition. Within our framework, it appears as a heterogeneous critical phenomenon : observables for different degree classes have a different scaling with the infection rate. This leads to the successive activation of the degree classes beyond the epidemic threshold.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure