A vision of elementary school leadership : a reflective research paper

I want to help children feel that sense of belonging, self-worth, and pride that comes from learning. My task as an administrator will be to put the necessary pieces in place to make sure that happens. One strand woven throughout all my experiences is the importance of building and sustaining relationships. Two key beliefs I will discuss in the following pages include: 1. The keys to helping our students find success is in the effectiveness of our teachers. 2. An administrator is responsible for creating a nurturing school environment, which enables him/her to lead students, families and staff toward a shared sense of purpose

Influence of Context on Item Parameters in Forced-Choice Personality Assessments

A fundamental assumption in computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is that item parameters are invariant with respect to context – items surrounding the administered item. This assumption, however, may not hold in forced-choice (FC) assessments, where explicit comparisons are made between items included in the same block. We empirically examined the influence of context on item parameters by comparing parameter estimates from two FC instruments. The first instrument was compiled of blocks of three items, whereas in the second, the context was manipulated by adding one item to each block, resulting in blocks of four. The item parameter estimates were highly similar. However, a small number of significant deviations were observed, confirming the importance of context when designing adaptive FC assessments. Two patterns of such deviations were identified, and methods to reduce their occurrences in a FC CAT setting were proposed. It was shown that with a small proportion of violations of the parameter invariance assumption, score estimation remained stable

Construct Validity and Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment

Cognitive diagnostic assessment (CDA) is increasingly a major focus in psychological and educational measurement. Instead of inferring a general response tendency or behavior consistency of an examinee over a target domain of measurement, diagnostic assessment results provide a detailed account of the underlying cognitive basis of the examinee's performance by mining the richer information that is afforded by specific response patterns

Measuring pregnancy planning: An assessment of the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy among urban, south Indian women

Copyright © 2010 Corinne H. Rocca et al. This open-access work is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 2.0 Germany, which permits use, reproduction & distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) and source are given credit. See http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/de/.We evaluated the psychometric properties of the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy among Indian women using classical methods and Item Response Modeling. The scale exhibited good internal consistency and internal structure, with overall scores correlating well with each item’s response categories. Items performed similarly for pregnant and non-pregnant women, and scores decreased with increasing parity, providing evidence for validity. Analyses detected small disadvantages, including low endorsement of middle response categories and some evidence of differential item functioning by parity. We conclude that the LMUP is suitable for use in India and recommend steps for improving scale performance for this cultural context.National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Levis Strauss Foundation

Problem Restructuring Processes for Ill-Structured Verbal Analogies

Copyright 1981 Psychonomic Society, Inc.Published under the name Susan E. Whitely.The processes involved in analogy solving have been an important investigative area in cognitive psychology. Although problem restructuring has been a central construct in problem solving theory, no restructuring processes have been proposed for analogical reasoning. Yet, the stimulus terms for analogies, as they appear on ability tests, are often ill-structured. That is, they are ordered in a way that does not permit direct problem comprehension. In the current study, both perceptual and semantic problem restructuring processes were hypothesized for analogy solving. The independence, stage of execution, and susceptibility to strategic control of the two processes were examined. The results from two experiments indicated that (1) ill-structured analogies are restructured during problem solving, (2) perceptual and semantic restructuring processes are independent and executed at different stages of analogy solving, and (3) both processes exhibited automaticity since repetition of analogy solution attenuated but did not eliminate either restructuring process. A model of analogical reasoning that incorporated both restructuring processes and their execution sequences was proposed. The nature and automaticity of perceptual and semantic analogy restructuring processes were discussed

Hyperarousal symptoms after traumatic and nontraumatic births

Background: Measurement is critical in postnatal posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because symptoms may be influenced by normal postnatal phenomena such as physiological changes and fatigue. Objective: This study examined: (1) whether hyperarousal symptoms differ between women who have traumatic or nontraumatic births; (2) whether the construct of hyperarousal is coherent in postnatal women; and (3) whether hyperarousal symptoms are useful for identifying women who have traumatic births or PTSD. Methods: A survey of PTSD symptoms in 1,078 women recruited via the community or Internet who completed an online or paper questionnaire measuring childbirth-related PTSD symptoms between 1 and 36 months after birth. Women who had a traumatic birth as defined by DSM-IV criterion A (n = 458) were compared with women who did not have a traumatic birth (n = 591). Results: A one-factor dimension of hyperarousal was identified that included all five hyperarousal items. Diagnostic criteria of two or more hyperarousal symptoms in the previous week were reported by 75.3% of women with traumatic birth and 50.5% of women with nontraumatic births. The difference in mean hyperarousal symptoms between groups was substantial at 0.76 of a standard deviation (Hedge’s g, CI = 0.64, 0.89). A larger difference was observed between women with and without diagnostic PTSD (g = 1.64, CI 1.46, 1.81). However, receiver operating characteristic analyses showed hyperarousal symptoms have poor specificity and alternative ways of calculating symptoms did not improve this. Comparison with other PTSD symptoms found re-experiencing symptoms were most accurate at identifying women with traumatic births. Conclusions: Results suggest hyperarousal symptoms are associated with traumatic birth and are a coherent construct in postnatal women. However, they have poor specificity and should only be used as part of diagnostic criteria, not as a sole indicator