Assess Unidimensionality of Computerized Reading Comprehension and Math Tests

To compare the impact of trait emotional intelligence between students of different faculties and associated factors. The cross-sectional analytical study was conducted from August 2016 to March 2017 at the University of Faisalabad, Faisalabad, Pakistan, and comprised undergraduate students, both boarders and day scholars, from seven different faculties. Data was collected using the trait emotional intelligence questionnaire-short form. Student's yearly test scores were obtained as a measure of academic achievement. Data was analysed using SPSS 20. Of the 498 students, 109(21.9%) were studying medicine, 56(11.2%) dental sciences, 76(15.2%) optometry, 83(16.6%) nutrition and dietetics, 109(21.9%) physiotherapy, 35(7%) pharmacy, and 30(6%) social sciences. The overall mean age was 19.84±1.30 years. There were 210(42.2%) boarders compared to 288(57.8%) day scholars. There was significant difference in emotional intelligence based on student's faculty (p<0.0001). Significant impact was seen on test scores of faculty residing status (p<0.05). Significant relation of emotional quotient and residing status with student's test scores (p<0.05). Emotional intelligence was found to be an important factor in academic achievement and important variable in different faculties and different living conditions.

Accurately measuring performance is important to any organization, including schools. State longitudinal data systems with annual student assessments are expanding the possibilities for measuring school and teacher performance. This can increase the potential for evaluating educators in ways that are fair and improve performance and student outcomes. Unfortunately, despite almost two decades of the new that links student test scores to schools, our performance measurement and accountability systems are still broken. Some of the problems--narrowing the curriculum and teaching to the test--have received widespread attention. Another critical problem is less widely recognized. The Principle of as I will call it, is that we should hold people accountable for what they can control. But accountability systems violate this principle when they focus on student attainment, or student achievement at a point in time. The problem with attainment has to do with a basic fact of human development: Knowledge and skill accumulate over each person's life. What adults know and can do depends on what they experienced as students, which in turn depends on experiences before school, all the way back to birth (Heckman 2006). Kindergarteners have vastly different early childhood experiences and readiness for school. For example, black students start kindergarten with scores that are already 22 percentile points behind white kindergartners (Fryer and Levitt 2004). Schools have not caused these starting-gate inequalities, because most students haven't set foot in a classroom before kindergarten. The gaps are so large and persistent that even effective schools don't completely overcome them. Not only are the gate inequalities large, but nonschool factors continue to influence children as they progress through school. So, while the new focus on student achievement was a step forward in some ways, both state and federal policies misuse test scores in ways that violate the Fundamental Principle of Accountability. These misuses have consequences. Performance measures based on student test score attainment are partly responsible for pressuring schools to exclude students from testing (Figlio 2005) and pushing out good teachers (Clotfelter et al. 2004) who are frustrated by a system that punishes them no matter how well they perform. It's also well known that school systems, especially urban school districts, spin their wheels in an endless cycle of reform and changes in curriculum, instruction, and leadership (Hess 1998). A continual cycle of reform might make sense if those schools were continually failing, but low-performing schools often aren't failing by more reasonable definitions. As I will show below, many low-attainment schools are actually high-performing, and the reverse is also true. While we have focused on low-attainment schools, high-attainment schools present an equally large, but hidden, problem. In these schools, students enter with high scores, so their attainment remains high almost no matter what the schools do. These schools often largely ignore external accountability. Fortunately, we can take steps to help avoid confounding out-of-school influences with school or teacher performance. The Basics of Value-Added Accountability Performance can be reasonably defined, according to the Fundamental Principle of Accountability, as what each school and teacher contributes to student outcomes. But how can we measure that? One simple way to measure performance is by subtracting the initial level of student achievement test score from the end-of-year test score. This is illustrated in Figure 1, in which each arrow represents the achievement growth of students in two hypothetical schools: Rockefeller Elementary and Smith Elementary. The bracket in the lower left corner indicates the differences in initial achievement--the starting gate inequality--and shows that Rockefeller students begin in a stronger position than Smith students. …

In Lebanon, a great number of students hold a negative attitude towards reading comprehension in Arabic and are inadequately prepared to face the challenges of reading in middle school, due to the traditional unchallenging instructional approaches and the demanding nature of formal Arabic among other factors. The Collaborative Strategic Reading strategy was used in this study with a group of seventh grades at a private elitist school in Beirut. Results showed that when this new technique which involves cooperative learning and metacognitive thinking is systematically applied, it showed considerable improvement in test scores in the experimental group relative to the controls. Also, questionnaires and interviews that were used with Arabic teachers of seventh grade indicated that they were aware of the reading comprehension problems and their students’ negative attitudes towards independent reading in Arabic, but do not seem to be willing to initiative any changes in either their instructional approach or motivational strategies.

Universal school-based social and emotional Learning (SEL) programs are designed to provide structured learning opportunities for all students during the regular school time to advance their social, emotional, and academic development. This systematic review and meta-analysis reviewed 40 empirical studies (n = 40) conducted between 2008 and 2020 and explored the effect of SEL programs on students’ academic achievement across first through twelfth grade. The analysis involved 33,737 students and 76 effect sizes (k = 76) related explicitly to academic achievement. Findings reveal that students in grades 1–12 who participated in universal school-based SEL programs demonstrated better academic achievement (g = .101) compared to those who did not participate. Analyses further confirmed that student standardized test scores and grade point averages are improved by participating in SEL programs and that student test scores are the most proximal and accurate estimate of the effects of an SEL program on student achievement. Furthermore, students showed significantly improved achievement in both literacy and math across grades 1–12, suggesting the impact of SEL across academic domains. Implications for addressing the academic achievement gap through SEL programs are discussed.

In the study, we wanted to test whether ＂math is the predecessor of science＂ and developed a new model of Causality Evaluation on fuzzy correlation and empirically examined the fuzzy correlation with student test scores in Mathematics and Science. Our sample comprised 416 Taiwanese students in the 12-years education. We applied fuzzy theory and conducted Transfer Function with the scores to illustrate the efficiency of our proposed methods. The results of empirical study showed that Mathematics and Science had high causality relationships each other.

Non-Cognitive Skills and the Gender Disparities in Test Scores and Teacher Assessments: Evidence from Primary School

Standardized tests are used to test students as they progress in the formal education system. These tests are readily available and have clear evaluation procedures.Hence, it has been proposed that these tests can serve as good benchmarks for AI. In this thesis, we propose approaches for solving some common standardized teststaken by students such as reading comprehensions, elementary science exams, geometry questions in the SAT exam and mechanics questions in the AP physics exam.Answering these test problems requires deep linguistic (and sometimes visual) understanding and reasoning capabilities which is challenging for modern AI systems. In the first part of this thesis, we explore novel approaches to answer natural language comprehension tests such as reading comprehensions and elementary science tests (chapters 4, 5 and 6). These tests evaluate the system’s ability to understand text through a question-answering task. We present new latent structure models for these tasks. We posit that there is a hidden (latent) structure that explains the relation between the question, the correct answer, and the piece of text. We call this the answer-entailing structure; given the structure, the correctness of the answeris evident. Since the structure is latent, it must be inferred. We present a unified max-margin framework that learns to find these hidden structures given a corpus ofquestion-answer pairs, and uses what it learns to answer questions on novel texts. We also describe a simple but effective extension of this framework to incorporatemulti-task learning on the different subtasks that are required to perform the overall task (chapter 4), a deeper representation of language based on AMRs (chapter5) and how can we incorporate external knowledge in the answer-entailing structure (chapter 6). These advances help us obtain state-of-the-art performance on two well-known natural language comprehension benchmarks. In the second part of this thesis (chapter 7), we tackle some hard reasoning problems in the domains of math and science - geometry questions in the SAT exam and mechanics question in the AP physics exam. Solving these problems requires an ability to incorporate the rich domain knowledge as well as an ability to perform reasoning based on this knowledge. We propose a parsing to programs (P2P) approach for these problems. P2P assumes a formal representation language of the domain and domain knowledge written down as programs. This domain knowledge can be manually provided by a domain expert, or, as we show in our work, can be extracted by reading a number of textbooks in an automated way. When presentedwith a question, P2P learns a representation of the question in the formal language via a multi-modal semantic parser. Then, it uses the formal question interpretation and the domain knowledge to obtain an answer by using a probabilistic reasoner. A key bottleneck in building these models is the amount of domain-specific supervisionrequired to build them. Thus, in the final part of this thesis (chapter 8), we propose a self-training method based on curriculum learning that jointly learns to generate and answer questions. This method obtains near state-of-the-art models on a number of natural language comprehension tests with lesser supervision.

The purpose of the study was to compare the basic skills achievement scores of mobile and non-mobile students within the Portland Public Schools. The problem was to assess the effect of this mobility on basic skills achievement and the total educational program. The study was designed to test differences in reading, language usage and mathematics achievement test scores between pupils in the third through the eighth grades. The instrument that was used was the Portland Achievement Levels Tests of reading, language usage and math. These tests are administered to students in grades 3 - 8 in the fall and spring of each school year. A questionnaire was also designed to determine the effect of student mobility on instructional programs. This questionnaire was mailed to 81 principals with 56 responding. The Portland Public Schools computer banks were utilized to plot the basic skills test results for two groups of students: 1. The clear and intact group, which was the student who was in the same school from September through June (grades 3 - 8). 2. The mobile student (grades 3 - 8) who had a valid fall and spring test score, but from different schools. Plotting was done for the residual effect of variables in basic skill gains rather than plotting for the effects of regression. Additional analysis took place using multiple regressions by stability index, to determine the relationship between student achievement test scores and the independent variables of mobility and other independent variables (ethnic groups, gender). It was determined that student mobility and the independent variables of gender and ethnicity had no negative effect on basic skills achievement test scores. However, for the stable student, the higher the school stability index, the higher the achievement level for the non-mobile students in that school for the fall testing. The achievement gain was no different for a student in a high stability school versus a low stability school. Additionally, based on the results of the questionnaire used in the study, most principals felt that student mobility had a negative impact on instructional programs. Most of the responding principals, however, were opposed to a more structured district wide basic skills curriculum as a way of moderating the negative effects of student mobility on the educational program. Student mobility is a factor related to the success of a school academic program. It cannot, however, be taken as an answer to the low achievement

The effects of public high school subsidies on student test scores: The case of a full-day high school in Pernambuco, Brazil

&lt;p&gt;Reading Chinese is one of the most challenging tasks for learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL learners). Studies showed that effective use of strategies (e.g. inferring meaning from context) helps to enhance reading comprehension. However, so far, most studies about reading Chinese as a foreign language have focused on lower-level processing (e.g. word learning strategies, the effects of orthography on word acquisition, etc.). Studies about reading process and strategies of adult CFL learners engaging in independent Chinese text reading are extremely limited, and few studies compare reading strategies and perceptions of successful and less successful CFL readers. This study filled these gaps by investigating adult CFL learners’ reading strategies and comparing strategy use and perceptions of successful CFL readers and less successful ones. Using the Compensatory Model of Second Language Reading (Bernhardt, 2005; 2011) as the theoretical framework, this study answered three research questions with sub questions: 1. What are the reading strategies used by adult CFL learners? (a) What are overall reading strategies used by adult CFL readers? (b) What are effective strategy combinations used by adult CFL readers? 2. How do successful adult CFL readers apply and perceive reading strategies when reading in Chinese? 3. How do less successful adult CFL readers apply and perceive reading strategies when reading in Chinese? Qualitative research methods were used to collect and analyze the data. Twelve college level third-year Chinese learners were asked to read a Chinese text, finish a think-aloud task (verbally express their thought process), recall the content of the text, answer several text-related questions, and engage in semi-structured interviews. This study identified 14 bottom-up strategies and 12 top-down strategies. The effective reading strategy combinations used by CFL readers included 1) inferring word meaning by accessing context cues, character meaning, and mental lexical networks; 2) monitoring comprehension by using context information, rereading, summarizing, noticing text structure, paraphrasing, or translating difficult parts; 3) segmenting Chinese words by checking the dictionary, conducting grammar analysis, and referring to mental lexicons. Through comparing the cases of successful and less successful CFL readers, this study revealed that successful readers were good at using context information, monitoring comprehension, and distinguishing important text segments from less important ones. They showed confidence in applying reading strategies and consciously acquired and practiced using strategies while reading. Less successful readers, on the other hand, had more difficulties in decoding characters and words as well as understanding complicated sentence structures. They did not trust their ability to infer about words and phrases, and relied more on the dictionary and translation. In addition, compared with less successful readers, successful readers used more top-down strategies, and they had better metacognitive competences in applying a wide range of strategies effectively. The findings of this study provide useful pedagogical implications to improve Chinese reading instruction and a better understanding about reading Chinese as well as L2 reading.&lt;/p&gt;

Efficiency in Reading Comprehension: A Comparison of Students' Competency in Reading Printed and Digital Texts.

Reading skill has its own modes; two of them are reading aloud and silent reading. Reading aloud and silent reading modes are interrelated with each other and affecting students' reading comprehension competence. The most EFL students’ common problems in the school is they do not know the appropriate techniques or modes applied in reading comprehension, therefore their reading comprehension results cannot be maximized. The researcher used quantitative research method and comparative study research design in conducting the research process. By using Reading Comprehension Test and interview, researcher collecting all the data in order to find deep information about how Indonesian EFL learners’ reading comprehension are through silent reading and reading aloud, its significance, and the factors that influence students’ reading comprehension score. The researcher took the samples in 34 students who divided into two groups; 17 students for silent group and 17 students for aloud group. The findings of this quantitative research indicated that there is no significance difference between reading aloud and silent reading regarding to Indonesian EFL learners reading comprehension competence and Reading Comprehension Factor (RCF) as the most factor that influence students’ reading comprehension score in silent group, while Reading Factor other than Comprehension (RFOC) as the most factor that influence students’ reading comprehension score in aloud group.

This is a descriptive study using 6 years of secondary data to determine how a cohort of entering Filipino students at Rainbow Community College were performing on selected educational outcomes including Math and English placements (based on COMPASS test scores), remedial, developmental, and college level English and Math course attempts and completions, and finally, degree and certificate outcomes. Scant research exists on Filipino student performance in community colleges, especially since Filipinos are typically aggregated into a larger Asian category. Results found a majority of the cohort placing into at least one remedial or developmental course in English or Math and very few students transferring and completing a Baccalaureate degree. No significant differences were found when comparing English and Math completion rates by gender and no discernable patterns were found regarding English and Math course taking patterns in relation to degree completion. The results indicated that students’ best chance to successfully complete their remedial/developmental coursework is if it is attempted within the first year of enrollment in the college. Some policy implementations are suggested. The small size of the Filipino cohort was one of the major limitations of the study. Future research possibilities are also discussed.

Vocabulary size adequacy in a foreign language is well recognized by second language researchers to carry great importance for L2 learners in achieving academic purposes. While Laufer (1992) and Laufer & Nation (1995) assert that ESL learners need to achieve a 5000 word level in order to secure adequate comprehension in academic reading, Chen's findings (1999) indicate that in the Taiwanese university context, only four of the 58 English non-majors tested with the Vocabulary Level Tests (receptive version by Nation, 1990) achieve the 5000 word level. The present study extends Chen's study to examine 34 fourth year Taiwanese university English majors with similar questions: First, do these majors attain the 5000-word level, in terms of either receptive or productive vocabulary scores? Secondly, as an alternative benchmark (Beglar & Hunt, 1999), do these same majors attain both the 2000 word level and the University Word List for the receptive vocabulary test? Thirdly, do they show an obvious gap between receptive and productive vocabularies? Finally, do either receptive and productive vocabulary test scores correlate significantly with general reading proficiency test scores? Results show for the receptive vocabulary test implemented, 33 of 34 English majors attain over two-thirds correct responses through the 5000 word level test, and none reach the 10,000 word level. For productive vocabulary testing, only 3 of 34 majors attain the 5000 word level, while 30 English majors attain both the 2000 level and University Word List. Gap sizes between scores for receptive and productive vocabulary tests for majors are highly significant, and these scores are found to have strong correlation to scores for a general reading proficiency test administered as part of this study. Pedagogical implications of the present findings are discussed, as well as issues for further exploration and development to facilitate EFL vocabulary acquisition.

Background (General &amp; Specific): Reading is an important skill in English learning that is often challenging for students, especially in understanding descriptive texts. Knowledge Gap: However, the effectiveness of learning strategies such as the SQ3R method in the context of secondary school students' reading comprehension remains under-researched empirically. Aim: This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of SQ3R (Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review) method in improving reading comprehension of grade X students at SMA Negeri 1 Pajar Bulan. Methods &amp; Results: Using a quasi-experimental design, two groups of students were compared: an experimental group that received instruction with the SQ3R method and a control group with the conventional method. Results showed a significant increase in the experimental group's reading comprehension score (mean 67.13) over the control group (mean 44.55), based on paired and independent t-tests. Novelty: This study shows that SQ3R effectively strengthens students' ability to summarize text content, find specific information, and understand vocabulary. Implications: The findings indicate that the integration of SQ3R strategy in reading instruction can be an effective pedagogical approach to improve students' reading comprehension in an active and structured manner.Highlights: Enhances critical reading through structured stages (Survey to Review). Demonstrates significant improvement in students' test scores. Supports vocabulary and detail identification in descriptive texts. Keywords: SQ3R Method, Reading Comprehension, Descriptive Text, English Education, Experimental Study