Pragmatic Measurement for Education Science: A Method-Substance Synergy of Validation and Motivation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Education researchers often require quick and efficient assessments of various student characteristics (e.g., motivation) to use in classroom settings. Unfortunately, guidelines for addressing measurement obstacles, such as scale length, are ambiguous at best and non-existent at worst. Many measures lack sufficient evidence that the conclusions they produce are merited, and short measures have received particular criticism from measurement experts. The result is a tension between technical and pragmatic constraints when conducting measurement in field research. This three-paper dissertation is aimed at identifying and addressing these tensions in one area of motivation research. Paper 1 provides the substantive frame for the overall dissertation. The goal was to understand short-term student motivation change in a classroom setting. Paper 2 provides a typical approach to assessing a scale’s quality and viability for use in the field. The goal was to use traditional psychometric approaches to evaluate a brief measure of motivation. Finally, Paper 3 presents a pragmatic approach to determining validity evidence (i.e., pragmatic measurement) by considering the underlying uses and restrictions of collecting data. The goal was to evaluate the pragmatic approach as a framework for measure users to identify the relevant validity evidence needed based on the potential uses and interpretations of a measure. Together, these papers highlight the nature and benefit of advancing methodological goals by pursuing substantive goals. The current research is a methodological-substantive synergy (i.e., work that advances a substantive domain, such as motivation, while developing and utilizing state-of-the-art methodology) aimed alleviating technical and practical tensions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it