Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Should The New England Education Research Organization Start A Journal In The Age Of Audit Culture? Reflections On Academic Publishing, Metrics, And The New Academy, Edward Lehner, Kate Finley

Publications and Research

A large regional educational research association can straightforwardly establish a scholarly journal associated with its annual meeting. However, this work underscores the complicated scholarly ecosystem that an association enters when publishing a journal. The social sciences’ scholarly literature exists in a related series of networks that could be described as a type of “audit culture.” Within audit culture, two major academic publishers, Elsevier and Thomson Reuters, have established competing, yet strikingly collinear, journal metrics systems: Scopus and Web of Science, respectively. These and other bibliometrics systems are used to assess, order, and rank the supposed value of a researcher’s work. …

Classification Accuracy Of Mixed Format Tests: A Bi-Factor Item Response Theory Approach, Wei Wang, Fritz Drasgow, Liwen Liu

Publications and Research

Mixed format tests (e.g., a test consisting of multiple-choice [MC] items and constructed response [CR] items) have become increasingly popular. However, the latent structure of item pools consisting of the two formats is still equivocal. Moreover, the implications of this latent structure are unclear: For example, do constructed response items tap reasoning skills that cannot be assessed with multiple choice items? This study explored the dimensionality of mixed format tests by applying bi-factor models to 10 tests of various subjects from the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) Program and compared the accuracy of scores based on the bi-factor analysis with …

Universalizing Primary Education In Sierra Leone: Promises And Pitfalls On The Path To Equity, Grace Pai

Publications and Research

What barriers remain in the progress towards achieving Universal Primary Education (UPE), and how does the UPE agenda affect out-of-school children? Through a mixture of historical, quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis, this study examines these questions using the developing context of Sierra Leone as a case study.

Findings from over 100 interviews show that first of all, the most salient barrier that prevents children from participating in primary school is the fact that school is not free de facto in spite of the national abolishment of primary school fees in 2004. Rather than commonly cited constraints such as a …