Declining enrollments in engineering programs, pressure from state legislatures, and accreditation have made student retention a major issue. Community building, mentoring and learning style models are some of the approaches used to improve retention. Retention studies have shown that high school grades and admission tests (SAT scores) are two of the more reliable pre-college indicators of succ...

Academic and occupational guidance of the 9th graders require a valid and reliable instrument. Given that Barrett Aptitude Test is widely available, and perhaps used, it was deemed necessary to assess its psychometric characteristics. To this end, a cluster sample of 830 ninth graders from among all such students during the 2017-2018 school year in cities of Saqqez and Bukan, was selected. They...

Using a sample of dental students (N=373) from four Canadian dental schools, this longitudinal study determined whether the new Canadian Dental Association (CDA) structured interview was a predictor of clinical and academic performance. The new interview predicted clinical performance in the third and fourth years of dental school, but not academic performance. The Canadian Dental Aptitude Test...

We investigated some of the key features of effective active learning by comparing the outcomes of three different methods of implementing active-learning exercises in a majors introductory biology course. Students completed activities in one of three treatments: discussion, writing, and discussion + writing. Treatments were rotated weekly between three sections taught by three different instru...

This paper investigates the effects of family background on academic achievement in basic education (grade 1-9) in rural China, using information on a sample of children aged 9-12 in 2000 from Gansu, China. The instrumental variable method developed by Mason and Griliches (1972), and Blackburn and Neumark (1992) is applied to control for unobserved child ability. Scores of a cognitive ability t...

The aim of this work is to investigate relationships among pre-service primary mathematics teachers’ gender, academic success and spatial ability. The study was conducted in Izmir with 193 pre-service primary mathematics teachers of Dokuz Eylül University. In the work, spatial ability test, which consists of two main subtests measuring spatial orientation and spatial visualization abilities, is...

The effect of formal education, as opposed to chronological age, on intelligence development has suffered from inadequate empirical investigation. Most studies of this issue have relied on natural variation in exposure to school among children of the same age, thus confounding differences in schooling with differences in other intelligence-related variables. This difficulty can be overcome by a...

Selection processes for medical schools need to be unbiased, valid, and psychometrically reliable, as well as evidence-based and transparent to all stakeholders. A range of academic and non-academic criteria are used for selection, including matriculation scores, aptitude tests and interviews. Research into selection is fraught with methodological difficulties; however, it shows positive benefi...

Teachers are increasingly being drawn from the lower parts of the general ability distribution, but it is not clear how this affects student achievement. We track the position of entering teachers in population-wide cognitive and non-cognitive ability distributions using school grades and draft records from Swedish registers. The impact on student achievement caused by the position of teachers ...