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Research has shown that media exposure to violence is positively correlated with anxiety and posttraumatic stress symptoms in children (Becker-Blease et al. 2008), and parents can influence children’s responses to media (Otto et al. 2007). Few studies have examined specific parenting behaviors related to their children’s response to violent news media exposure; which is further limited by the lack of available measures with adequate psychometric support (Comer & Kendall, 2007). The current study addresses this gap by developing a measure of specific ways that caregivers may influence their children’s exposure and reaction to violent news. Item content was generated based on a literature review and focus group interview with six parents. Using a sample of 702 participants recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, exploratory factor analysis was conducted on the initial 74-item measure of Caregiver Responses to Youth Media Exposure (CRYME). With a total of 35 items, a three-factor solution emerged.

This study examined the relationships between the SOL End-of-Course Reading and Writing tests and the new PSAT/NMSQT Verbal and Writing tests. The PSAT/NMSQT Writing tests were administered for the first time in October 2004. Two linear regression analyses were utilized, with PSAT/NMSQT Verbal and writing scores, gender, race, and special education as the independent variables, and SOL End-of-Course Reading and Writing scores as the dependent variables. Additionally, two logistic regression analyses were employed with the same variables to predict whether or not a student would pass the SOL End-of-Course Reading and Writing tests. Results indicated that the PSAT/NMSQT Verbal and Writing scores accounted for the bulk of the variance in the SOL Reading and Writing scores. Special education students were predicted to have much lower scores than their non-special education counterparts. Gender and race contributed the least to the regression analyses. With the emphasis on scientifically-based research, this study could be utilized to develop remediation programs for students predicted to fail the SOL tests. Further research is warranted using additional variables, such as GPA, socio-economic status, and a wider variety of race.

The field of psychometrics in South Africa faces many challenges. Among these are, that practitioners in the field of psychology do not always have access to standardised assessments for the South African context. Imported assessments pose various biases to South Africa’s multilingual and multicultural situations, hence the need for test adaptation. The Suffolk Reading Scale (2) (SRS2) is an English proficiency assessment that measures reading comprehension. English, being the language of learning and teaching in most South African schools, makes the SRS2 a significant gain to practitioners and the field of psychometrics. Consequently, this research aimed to narrow the gaps in this area of knowledge and contribute to it by evaluating the applicability of the SRS2 as a measure of reading comprehension for South African learners. Primary school learners in Kwa-Zulu Natal were administered the SRS2. The purpose of the study was to ascertain the degree of reliability of the SRS2. Of the 338 participants, 51.9 percent (n=140) of the sample were female, and 48.1 percent (n=130) were male. Sixty-six percent (n=164) of the participants spoke English as an Additional Language (EAL), while thirty-four percent (n=83) spoke English as a first language (EFL). Results indicated a significant difference in performance between EFL and EAL learners, whereby EAL learners performed lower than EFL learners. However there was no difference in performance between female learners and their male counterparts on individual items of the SRS2. The SRS2 proved to have a suitable internal consistency; however questions of bias do arise.

Since the days of Horace Mann, standardized testing has been used as a control mechanism by policy makers to determine who makes decisions about what will happen in public schools. A dynamic struggle for educational control and governance has continued since that time between the local, state, and federal levels. This struggle for control puts school principals in a unique organizational position where they are expected to use standardized tests within the school community with teachers, students, and parents to improve education but at the same time manage external accountability mandates from district, state and federal levels of governance. To further complicate the testing picture, multiple stakeholders from diverse backgrounds write about standardized testing, making the testing literature complex and seemingly contradictory. These competing narratives create distractions and confusion in the standardized testing debate. The purposes of this archival study was to (a) explore the literature about standardized testing to find patterns in the narratives that are being told in the disciplines of education, policy, economics, psychology/psychometry, and history; and, (b) analyze those narratives to determine what major themes emerged from each discipline so that principals can better understand the testing landscape. In each source we tracked first-author characteristics, one of which was author academic disciplinary background—the academic discipline the author primarily trained in during their formal education. With a better understanding of these disciplinary narratives, a principal is in a stronger position to understand and communicate more effectively about standardized testing within their school community, as well as manage the demands from external influences. This study used NVivo software to organize and analyze text from 147 documents from authors representing the five different disciplinary backgrounds. These documents were written by proponents and critics of testing. Patterns emerged that confirm that using standardized testing as a control mechanism is one of the most common themes in the testing literature. Each narrative is influential in unique ways, but the most important finding of this study shows that the two loudest narratives are those from education and policy. Both disciplines often focus on the reality that standardized testing is used as a control mechanism. Authors from the discipline of education wrote about this topic from a reactive and defensive position. Educators dominate the professional literature, but don't have nearly as strong of a voice in the mainstream media. On the other hand, the analysis demonstrated that authors in the realm of public policy write about standardized testing in a proactive and assertive tone, and they have a stronger voice in mainstream media. Understanding all five narratives can enable principals to more effectively and proactively take control of the standardized testing narrative in their own school community.

How well students perform on standardized tests can affect their educational paths and the rest of their lives. In addition, students' performances on state assessments will affect their schools due to the No Child Left Behind Act. For English language learners (ELLs), the success on tests may be diminished due to their inability to completely understand what they are reading on a test. Because ELLs are a growing proportion of the population and have greater risk of not performing well in school, dropping out, and not moving on to have a job, it is very important to address their educational performance. To alleviate the difficulty of not being able to understand English competently, various testing accommodations can be given. The purpose of this study was to describe how different types of accommodations are being distributed, particularly among ELL students, on an achievement test battery. Several variables were examined to assess whether they related to which accommodation would be assigned to an individual student. This study used data from a recent 2010 national standardization of an achievement test battery, which sampled 33,226 students from grades 3-8 across the U. S. In addition to the tests, students completed a survey which asked for such information as gender, home language, and ethnicity, and test administrators reported on that same survey which testing accommodations students were given, whether students were migrants, whether students participated in a free or reduced-price lunch program, and whether students were ELL students. These variables, along with students' Reading, Math, and Science scores were used to describe the groups of students given each accommodation. Five testing accommodations were reported by the students - giving students extended time to take the test, allowing students to use a word-to-word dictionary, reading parts of the test aloud to the students, repeating instructions, and having the test administered by an ELL teacher. Of all these, the group that was most similar to the entire sample on the test results for the Reading, Math, and Science was the group given dictionaries, a group predominantly comprised of Asian students. The other testing accommodation groups had much lower percentile ranks on average. ELL students were largely Hispanic, spoke Spanish at home, and had lower percentile ranks on the Reading, Math, and Science tests than non-ELL students. Although the majority of ELL students in this sample was not free or reduced-price lunch eligible, there was a higher percentage than was found in the sample as a whole. It was found that several variables were potentially important in how testing accommodations were distributed among students, including grade level, ethnicity, home language, and socioeconomic status (SES). Variables which did not seem important were gender and school. Home language and SES were also important in testing performance, with low SES students performing much worse on average than the sample as a whole. Students who had Spanish as their home language did not perform as well on the tests as students whose home language was English or another language. Lastly, a gap analysis using effect sizes showed some evidence for the gap between ELL and non-ELL students being larger in higher grade levels.

The expressive language tasks of the Test of Narrative Language (Gillam & Pearson, 2004) were administered to eleven deaf, native signers and fifteen English-speaking hearing children who were between the ages of six and ten years old. These tasks were administered to determine the appropriateness of this measure for use with special populations and bring to light new information about children's narrative development and the differences in the language modalities of these two groups. Also, the application of this information on future testing of deaf populations is examined. The eleven native signers came from a single residential school for the deaf, and all had deaf parents. The fifteen hearing children were recruited from a private school and through associates of the primary investigator. The tasks were administered according to the TNL manual's protocol and script, with the primary investigator speaking English for the hearing children and a native signer using American Sign Language for the deaf children. Their narratives in these tasks were coded according to the standards of the test and examined: factual story comprehension, story retell abilities (and inclusion of target terms), story generation from a picture sequence, and story generation from a single picture scene. This study found that though the hearing group outperformed the deaf group on each task's raw score, the specific subcategories of "Grammar" and "Story" from the picture sequence-based story generation task, and the "Characters" and "Vocabulary and Grammar" coding of the single picture-based generation task showed ASL users as having stronger narrative skills as a whole. Specific target items from the story retell also proved differentially problematic for the ASL group and should be altered in future utilization of the TNL with deaf children. In the future, the need for appropriate and representative testing of deaf children's narrative skills should take a higher priority, and greater understanding of the differences between ASL and English will be desired for both test creators and those testing deaf children. / text

The purpose of this research was to explore nurses' perceptions of the effectiveness of nursing documentation of patient status during a clinical event when using electronic documentation with or without embedded standardized languages. The theoretical framework for this study was based on principles of information theory. This study was significant in two very important ways; first, in contrast to prior studies, the perceptions of nurses were focused on the documentation of a clinical event. Second, this study explored the nurses' opinions about the strengths and limitations of using structured languages (specifically, the North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA), the Nursing Intervention Classification (NIC), and the Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC)) for telling the patient's story during a clinical event, as well as collecting nurses' suggestions for improving electronic documentation. Semi-structured interviews of 37 nurses were conducted in two acute care hospitals. Both hospitals used electronic documentation, but only one used embedded standardized nursing languages. Half the interviewees were asked questions from the perspective of the nurse documenting a clinical event; half were asked questions from the perspective of a nurse reviewing another nurse's documentation of a clinical event. Recorded interviews were transcribed, and the transcripts analyzed using qualitative content analysis. A panel of judges was used to establish reliability of the coding scheme. The results showed that nurses perceived aspects of three categories (usability, legibility, and communication) as strengths of the documentation system. Nurses perceived aspects of three categories (usability, communication, and workarounds) as limitations of the documentation system. Potential solutions to improve the documentation system were defined related to three categories (usability, communication, and collaboration). Usability was perceived by the nurses as a strength of the electronic documentation with embedded nursing languages. Usability of the electronic documentation system with nursing languages was also perceived as a limitation. Improving language usability was identified as a potential solution to improve the electronic documentation system with embedded nursing languages.

Univ., Diss.--Frankfurt (Main), 1994.

The current Accreditation Council for Occupational Therapy Education (ACOTE) Standards include a provision for the use of experiential learning methods as level I fieldwork experiences by entry-level occupational therapy (OT) education programs (ACOTE, 2018). Included in these experiences are two specific types of simulation: simulated environments and standardized patients. Earlier versions of the ACOTE Standards did not allow for the use of simulation as level I fieldwork experiences. This provision may help mitigate a shortage of level I and level II fieldwork placements and allow academic programs to provide consistent quality level I fieldwork across students (American Occupational Therapy Association [AOTA], 2017). This use of simulation as a fieldwork training method is an emerging area of OT education that has limited research on its use and best practice. This doctoral project sought to contribute to the existing knowledge by conducting a research study which investigated the use of both simulated environments and standardized patients by academic programs, as well as identifying the primary supports and barriers to its implementation. The project included the creation, distribution, and analysis of a national survey of entry-level OT programs. The survey found that the main barrier and support to implementation of simulation was funding and that private institutions are more likely to utilize standardized patients than public institutions. The results of this study will help inform future ACOTE Standards, provide both the American Occupational Therapy Association and ACOTE with additional information to help determine how to best provide resources for academic programs that facilitate successful implementation of the simulation methods, and help identify programs that can participate in the dissemination of best practice in the use of simulation as fieldwork experiences. The author recommends that ACOTE should also consider mandating the use of simulation, along with other experiential learning activities, as partial fulfillment of level I fieldwork requirements, to allow for better access to funding, decrease the fieldwork burden on traditional fieldwork sites, and allow for more consistent level I fieldwork experiences.