Claudette Maria Medeiros Vendramini

O teste de Cloze na avaliação da compreensão em leitura

This research studied the psychometric properties of a reading comprehension test using the Cloze’s technique. The participants were 612 freshmen undergraduate students whose task was to discover the omitted words. It was observed a good fit to a two parameter model of Item Response Theory. The total score composed by the sum of the correct completions achieved high level of reliability (KR-20 = .84). Considering the item complexities, two groups were formed: one composed of very easy items, and the other with very complex ones. A parcel of item complexity was explained by the grammatical category of the word to be discovered (r= 0.62, p < 0.001). From the highest to the lowest difficulty level: adjectives, verbs, adverbs, nouns, pronouns, prepositions, articles were observed. The cognitive processes that could explain the differences in the difficulties correlated with grammatical categories were analized. Trough this analysis and trough Item Response Theory (IRT) the advances of item referenced interpretation in describing reading comprehension proficiency were discussed.

Construção e validação de uma escala sobre avaliação da vida acadêmica (EAVA)

Construction and validation of an academic life assessment scale. This study aimed to construct and to validate a scale of academic life assessment to obtain the student’s self-perception about the academic life. The scale was administered to 1,118 academic students aged 19 to 62 years (M = 25 years, SD = 6 years), and 54 percent of the students were male. The factorial analysis indicated a scale with five factors - academic ambient, course commitment, student’s ability, involvement with non obligatory activities, and condition to the study - whose eigenvalues were larger than one, explaining 43 percent of the total variance. The scale included 34 items with factor loadings larger than 0.30, with a good internal consistency indicated by Cronbachcoefficient ( = 0.873) to evaluate the construct – the students integration with the academic life. Each sub-scale’s internal consistency level reached acceptable levels, ranging from 0.631 to 0.803.

Parâmetros psicométricos: estudo comparativo entre testes de inteligência e de personalidade

Nowadays, the validity and the reliability of psychological tests are being very questioned and discussed. The current study aims to evaluate the validity, the reliability and the existence of Brazilian standardization in 43 psychological tests commercialized in Brazil, being 22 of intelligence and 21 of personality. The tests have been compared concearning the publication period in Brazil. The results have indicated that there is a bigger number of instruments published in the 1980·s and 1990·s, that the intelligence tests present more studies of standardization, validity and reliability, even though there hasn·t been significant difference among the groups tests (intelligence and personality). New studies must be developed aiming to promote the psychological tests and the area of psychological assessment, as a whole.

Habilidades básicas e desempenho acadêmico em universitários ingressantes

Recent studies of adult cognitive development have distinguished two core abilities: fluid intelligence as a general capacity to infer complex relationships, abstract concepts, and to deduce logical implications from general rules; and crystallized intelligence as a capacity to solve problems by using organized knowledge schemes from specific disciplines. In order to investigate a possible relationship between cognitive abilities and area of study, this research studied the correlation between fluid and crystallized intelligence measures and academic achievement among 960 freshmen students of eight areas of study: Medicine, Dentistry, Psychology, Business, Engineering, Mathematics, Education, and Literature. The results have indicated that the academic achievement is correlated with different abilities profile.

Atitudes em relação à estatística e à matemática

This study verified if the attitudes toward statistics should be related by the attitudes toward mathematics developed during the students school life. The subjects were 330 undergraduate students who passed in Introductory Statistics in 1998. It was applied a questionnaire, a scale of attitudes towards statistics and a scale of attitudes towards mathematics. Both the scales presented a high intern consistent. The students presented more positive attitudes toward mathematics instead of statistics. There wasn’t attitudes difference in relation to gender. The exacts science students presented attitudes more positive toward mathematics and the science human students presented attitudes more negative toward statistics. The results indicated that there is a association of the attitudes towards mathematics with a the attitudes towards statistics and this association is more strong in students of science human courses.

Competências e habilidades cognitivas: diferentes definições dos mesmos construtos

Recently, educational assessment systems implemented by the Brazilian government have called attention to the human cognitive abilities that have been under study by psychologists since a long time ago. This work analyze the conceptual model of abilities and competencies that underlies the National Exam of High School Education comparing it with contemporary models of human intelligence from psychometrics and cognitive psychology traditions. Although the models use distinct terms they are referring to similar constructs namely fluid and crystallized intelligence, nevertheless construct validity studies are necessary to investigate more clearly what construct the test measures.

Análise de itens de uma prova de raciocínio estatístico

This study aimed at to analyze the 18 questions (of multiple choice type) of a test on basic concepts of Statistics for the classic and modern theories. The test was taken by 325 undergraduate students, randomly selected from the areas of Human, Exact and Health Sciences. The analysis indicated that the test has predominantly one dimension and that the items can be better fitting to the model of three parameters. The indexes of difficulty, discrimination and biserial correlation present acceptable values. It is suggested to include new items to the test in order to obtain reliability and validity to use it in the education context and to reveal the statistical reasoning of undergraduate students when dealing with statistical data representation.

Relações entre atitude, conceito e utilidade da estatística

Researches have indicated students’ negative attitudes towards Statistics and difficulties to learn it. Thus, this paper analyzes the relationships between the attitudes towards Statistics, its concept and its usefulness for 319 university students who answered an informative questionnaire and a scale of attitudes towards Statistics. This scale shows a high internal consistence. The few subjects who were able to define Statistics did not present any differences in attitudes as compared to those who were not able to define it. The majority of the students who considered Statistics a useful tool revealed more positive attitudes than those ones who did not consider it useful. These results suggest that teaching strategies that reveal the usefulness of Statistics should be adopted to allow students to develop more positive attitudes, and, thus, improve its teaching-learning process.

Teoria de Resposta ao Item na análise de uma prova de estatística em universitários

Resumo Este estudo objetivou aplicar a Teoria de Resposta ao Item na analise das 15 questoes de multipla escolha de uma prova de estatistica apresentada na forma de graficos ou de tabelas estatisticas. Participaram 413 universitarios, selecionados por conveniencia, de duas instituicoes da rede particular de ensino superior, predominantemente do curso de Psicologia (91,5%). Os universitarios foram 80% do genero feminino e do periodo diurno (69,8%), com idades de 16 a 53 anos, media 24,4 e desvio padrao 7,4. A prova e predominantemente unidimensional e os itens sao mais bem ajustados ao modelo logistico de tres parâmetros. Os indices de discriminacao, dificuldade e correlacao bisserial apresentam valores aceitaveis. Os resultados mostram as dificuldades apresentadas pelos estudantes com relacao aos conceitos matematicos e estatisticos, dificuldades essas observadas em outras pesquisas desde o ensino fundamental. Sugere-se que esses conceitos sejam tratados mais profundamente no ensino superior. Palavras-Chave: Representacao tabular e grafica; Dificuldades matematicas; Estudantes de psicologia. Item Response Theory to analyze a statistics test in university students

Autoconceito e desempenho de universitários na disciplina estatística

This study aimed to assess the university students ’ self-concept in statistics course and its relation to academic area, period, semester, age and gender of the sample. An identification questionnaire and a self-concept scale were answered by 116 Psychology students and 32 Pedagogy students. The sample consisted of eighteen to sixty-five year-old, 86% female and 58% evening period students. The Thurstone scale with 2 1 items allowed classifying in low, appropriated and high self-concept. The analysis showed appropriated self-concept in 67% of participants. T he principal results have revealed that there is positive correlation between self-concept and achievement in statistics course. On the other hand, it is not possible to state how the high self-concept contributed to a better student ’s achievement. The limitations of this study suggested other studies related to this construct in the academic area of research.