Psychology Commons^™

Beyond Right Or Wrong: The Influences Of Thinking Disposition And Item Difficulty On Student Behavior During High-Stakes Testing, Kristina Lindquist

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

A hallmark of clinician decision making is the ability to know when to make quick decisions and when decision making should be slowed to account for complicating factors. Throughout the physician training process, multiple choice test items are used to assess student knowledge however, these items do not assess the process used by a student to arrive at the answer choice. If an important characteristic of decisions in clinical practice is timing, then decision timing could be an important consideration for medical school assessments. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to investigate factors that may affect the amount of …

Cognitive Differences Between High And Low Responders Of A Tier Ii Reading Intervention, Jillian Cohen

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study evaluated a population of young students with potential reading disabilities who participated in a large western school district's Reading Skills Development project from October 2012 to May 2013. The following questions were addressed: Are there cognitive differences between students who respond well to an intense Tier II reading intervention and those who make little progress? If so, which cognitive skills best discriminate between high and low responders? De-identified data was collected from 171 struggling readers in 1st through 3rd grade who participated in the Reading Skills project. After controlling for English proficiency level, high and low responders were …

In Quest Of A Dropout Theory: Examining The Utility Of An Ecological Approach Through Survey Research, Tiffany G. Tyler

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This study examined the utility of Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Theory as a metatheory of dropout. Using the NELS: 1988 dataset, the present study examined the relationship between dropout attributions and Bronfenbrenner's construct, the microsystem. Attention was given to accounting for students' attributions regarding their identity (e.g., demographic and profile characteristics) with environmental and regional contexts as possible moderators. In particular, the present study examined the responses given as reasons for dropout in view of how those responses could be categorized with Bronfenbrenner's theoretical structure and the extent to which the resulting categorization could predict dropout, considering related demographic variable.

This study …

The Multiple-Choice Concept Map (Mccm): An Interactive Computer-Based Assessment Method, Ioan C. Sas

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This research attempted to bridge the gap between cognitive psychology and educational measurement (Mislevy, 2008; Leighton & Gierl, 2007; Nichols, 1994; Messick, 1989; Snow & Lohman, 1989) by using cognitive theories from working memory (Baddeley, 1986; Miyake & Shah, 1999; Grimley & Banner, 2008), multimedia learning (Mayer, 2001), and cognitive load (Chandler and Sweller, 1991, 1992; Cerpa, Chandler, & Sweller., 1996) to identify potential design weaknesses of traditional select-and-fill-in (SAFI) concept map assessment and then to guide the design of the new and improved multiple-choice concept map (MCCM) assessment method. The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the …