The relationship between fluid intelligence and working memory is of fundamental importance to understanding how capacity-limited structures such as working memory interact with inference abilities to determine intelligent behavior. Recent evidence has suggested that the relationship between a fluid abilities test, Raven's Progressive Matrices, and working memory capacity (WMC) may be invariant...

Weinstein and Roediger (Memory & Cognition 38:366-376, 2010) found that manipulating the order of questions on a general knowledge quiz resulted in differing evaluations of performance at the end of the quiz: Irrespective of their actual performance, participants were consistently more optimistic about their performance when questions were given in an easy-to-hard order. In the present experime...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to examine the cross-cultural differences of the PANSS across six geo-cultural regions. The specific aims are (1) to examine measurement properties of the PANSS; and (2) to examine how each of the 30 items function across geo-cultural regions. METHODS Data was obtained for 1,169 raters from 6 different regions: Eastern Asia (n = 202), India (n = 185)...

Two purposes motivated this study: (a) to quantify the difficulty in learning various symbols of the alphabet used to enter data into a personal digital assistant (PDA), and (b) to investigate the interaction of item difficulty with practice conditions that promote varying levels of cognitive effort. Levels of compatibility between members of the PDA alphabet and English were quantified through...

Behavioral evidence suggests that memory for context (i.e., source memory) is more vulnerable to age-related decline than item memory. It is not clear, however, whether this pattern reflects a specific age-related deficit in context memory or a more general effect of task difficulty. In the present study, we used event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with healthy younger an...

This research seeks to identify possible predictors of the difficulty level of reading comprehension items used in a standardized psychometric test for university admission. Several potential predictors of difficulty were proposed, namely, propositional density, negations, grammatical structure, vocabulary difficulty, presence of enhancement elements (words highlighted typographically), item ab...

Personalized service is important on the Internet, especially in Web-based learning. Generally, most personalized systems consider learner preferences, interests, and browsing behaviors in providing personalized services. However, learner ability usually is neglected as an important factor in implementing personalization mechanisms. Besides, too many hyperlink structures in Web-based learning s...

Die Wissensraumtheorie (Doignon & Falmagne, 1985;1999), in der Testitems durch sog. Vermutungsrelationen geordnet werden, wurde verallgemeinert, um Vermutungsrelationen zwischen Tests zu definieren (Albert, 1995, Brandt, Albert & Hockemeyer, 1999;accepted). Als erste exemplarische Anwendung dieses Modells werden verschiedene Typen von induktiven Denkaufgaben nach dem Prinzip der komponentenweis...

This study aims to provide statistical evidence of the complementarity between classical test theory and item response models for certain educational assessment purposes. Such complementarity might support, at a reduced cost, future development of innovative procedures for item calibration in adaptive testing. Classical test theory and the generalized partial credit model are applied to tests c...