Opfer et al. (2012) found similar findings when they varied test items with plants or animals, with students providing more key evolutionary concepts for animal items than plant items.
The implication is that the meaning of the underlying concepts for some items differs according to language of administration and between ethnic groups; this may be related to any number of factors such as acculturation, translation or cultural differences in concept or interpretation.
We reasoned that student understanding of the core concepts of evolution could be ascertained by taking a sum of the ratings (either 1, which indicated the presence of evidence, or 0, which indicated no evidence) for the three core concepts for the mouse item and the human item (for a total of 6 ratings) together.
In the 1970s, environmental groups and the EPA were exploring the novel idea that recycling – a familiar concept for large items such as cars, machinery and metal scrap – could be extended down to the community level to solve the growing consumer waste problem.
CRAs held daily debriefing sessions in which they manually categorized information by reviewing the incoming audio recording and interviewer notes into binary matrices (truth tables) to arrive at a snap shot of recurrent themes or concepts for each interview guide item.
The concept of paying for items with loyalty points is nothing new, but typically it was confined to portal e-commerce stores or preselected items.
In addition, the book discusses concepts for test equating and differential item functioning, as well as Bayesian IRT models and plausible values using simple examples.
The entire site was custom built and designed especially for Item with the e-commerce concept central to its aesthetic.
A schematic outline of the project methodology describing the steps for concept elicitation, item generation and cognitive testing can be found in Figure 1.
Focus group discussions for concept and item generation, piloting of the questionnaire with cognitive debriefing, and instrument field testing with a retest were conducted simultaneously in five countries.
