High ability studies

Pragmatics Effect on English Writing Ability among High School Students

The purpose of this study is to find a practical solution for improving writing skill among Iranian high school learners of EFL. The main question was whether pragmatics had any priority over traditional methods in improving writing or not.  Forty high school students were selected on the basis of their performance in PET (2009). In addition the following instruments were also used in this quas...

Studies on the creaming ability of milk

Purpose in life among high ability adolescents

Leading high ability scholars have proposed theories that suggest a purpose in life may be particularly prevalent among high ability youth; however, the prevalence of purpose has not been empirically assessed among this population. Therefore using in-depth interviews the present study established the prevalence of purpose among a sample of high ability adolescents and compared it to the prevale...

Gender, Spatial Ability, and High-Stakes Testing

Researchers disagree on the relationships between gender, spatial ability and math achievement. Varied results from studies using different measures and populations fuel the debate. The present study adds to the gender-spatial-math literature by examining this relationship in the context of high-stakes math testing. Results indicate no gender effect on spatial ability or math achievement, and a...

Studies on automatic assessment of students’ reading ability

We report results from ongoing research on developing sophisticated measures for assessing a student’s reading ability and a tool for the student and teacher to create a profile of this ability. In the project we will also investigate how these measures can be transformed to values on known criteria like vocabulary, grammatical fluency and so forth, and how these can be used to analyse texts. S...