Life sciences faculty agree that developing scientific literacy is an integral part of undergraduate education and report that they teach these skills. However, few measures of scientific literacy are available to assess students’ proficiency in using scientific literacy skills to solve scenarios in and beyond the undergraduate biology classroom. In this paper, we describe the development, validation, and testing of the Test of Scientific Literacy Skills (TOSLS) in five general education biology classes at three undergraduate institutions. The test measures skills related to major aspects of scientific literacy: recognizing and analyzing the use of methods of inquiry that lead to scientific knowledge and the ability to organize, analyze, and interpret quantitative data and scientific information. Measures of validity included correspondence between items and scientific literacy goals of the National Research Council and Project 2061, findings from a survey of biology faculty, expert biology educator reviews, student interviews, and statistical analyses. Classroom testing contexts varied both in terms of student demographics and pedagogical approaches. We propose that biology instructors can use the TOSLS to evaluate their students’ proficiencies in using scientific literacy skills and to document the impacts of curricular reform on students’ scientific literacy.
The Student Engagement Instrument (SEI) is a self-report measure of cognitive and affective engagement with school. Prior SEI validation studies have focused primarily on construct validity through analyses of internal consistency, factor analysis, and measurement invariance. Results are presented here from a two-pronged study of the criterion validity of SEI scores. Using a middle school sample (N = 35,900), concurrent validity was assessed through analyses of group differences in SEI scores across student subgroups expected to differ in cognitive and affective engagement levels: behaviorally disengaged versus non-disengaged, high-risk versus low-risk disability status, and high versus low academic achievement. Next, through multiple logistic regression analyses, the 4-year predictive validity of SEI scores for on-time graduation and dropout was assessed in a cohort of first-time ninth graders (N = 11,588). Nearly all SEI factors demonstrated directionally consistent associations with each criterion, including considerable long-term predictive associations with both dropout and on-time graduation.
Safety Committee called for increased funding of the City's alternatives to incarceration. The Committee also called for more objective information on program participants, services, and outcomes. In response, the New York City Council and the City's Office of the Criminal Justice Coordinator commissioned the Vera Institute of Justice to conduct an evaluation of these programs and investigate their effect on the participants as well as public safety. To answer the questions posed by the New York City Council, researchers at Vera interviewed 68j felony offenders entering nine of the ten alternative programs, and then interviewed more than half of them again at the end of their third month. Over a three-year period, the researchers compared the reddivism rate for more than 300 of these offenders with the rate for a sample of similar offenders not sentenced to alternative programs.
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