High school health-education teachers' perceptions and practices related to teaching HIV prevention.

Background: HIV/AIDS is one of the leading causes of illness and death in the United States with individuals between the ages of 13 and 19 years being especially vulnerable for infection. The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes, perceptions, and instructional practices of high school health teachers toward teaching HIV prevention.

Methods: A total of 800 surveys were sent to a national random sample of high school health teachers and 50% responded.

A standardized rubric to evaluate student presentations.

Objective: To design, implement, and assess a rubric to evaluate student presentations in a capstone doctor of pharmacy (PharmD) course.

Design: A 20-item rubric was designed and used to evaluate student presentations in a capstone fourth-year course in 2007-2008, and then revised and expanded to 25 items and used to evaluate student presentations for the same course in 2008-2009. Two faculty members evaluated each presentation.

An instrument to objectively measure pharmacist professionalism as an outcome: a pilot study.

Background: Historically, academic success has been a major outcome for evaluating the effectiveness of pharmacy education programs and admission criteria. In other words, students' overall grades and/or specific course grades have determined academic success. However, there is a disconnection between students' grades and their performance during practicums or in practice.

Magnitude estimation and categorical rating scaling in social sciences: a theoretical and psychometric controversy.

This paper revisits a half-century long theoretical controversy associated with the use of magnitude estimation scaling (MES) and category rating scaling (CRS) procedures in measurement. The MES procedure in this study involved instructing participants to write a number that matched their impression of difficulty of a test item. Participants were not restricted in the range of numbers they could choose for their scale.

Deconstructing therapy outcome measurement with Rasch analysis of a measure of general clinical distress: the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised.

Rasch analysis was used to illustrate the usefulness of item-level analyses for evaluating a common therapy outcome measure of general clinical distress, the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R; Derogatis, 1994). Using complementary therapy research samples, the instrument's 5-point rating scale was found to exceed clients' ability to make reliable discriminations and could be improved by collapsing it into a 3-point version (combining scale points 1 with 2 and 3 with 4). This revision, in addition to removing 3 misfitting items, increased person separation from 4.

Whose criterion standard is it anyway?

A criterion-referenced standard is an important element of most successful professional testing programs. A growing body of evidence suggests that judge decisions are influenced by characteristics related to the normative experience of the individual judge (e.g.

Equating student satisfaction measures.

Colleges and universities conduct student satisfaction studies for many important policy making reasons. However the differences in instrumentation and the use of students' self-reported ratings of satisfaction makes such decisions sample-, instrument-, and institution-dependent. A common metric of student satisfaction would assist decision makers by providing a richness of information not typically obtained.