Iasonas Lamprianou

University of Cyprus · Department of Social and Political Sciences

This article focuses on rater severity and consistency and their relation to major changes in the rating system in a high-stakes testing context. The study is based on longitudinal data collected from 2009 to 2019 from the second language (L2) Finnishspeaking subtest in the National Certificates of Language Proficiency in Finland. We investigated w...

This article focuses on rater severity and consistency and their relation to different types of rater experience over a long period of time. The article is based on longitudinal data collected from 2009 to 2019 from the second language Finnish speaking subtest in the National Certificates of Language Proficiency in Finland. The study investigated w...

The way social protest affects electoral outcomes remains a lacuna. This article helps fill this gap by examining how social protest against far right actors affects their electoral standing. The article utilizes a unique dataset of 4,745 local protest events to investigate how mobilization against the far right in Greece affected its electoral per...

Biological age has been the main criterion for the recruitment of teachers in Cyprus until very recently. Prospective teachers, especially in secondary education, would typically register on long waiting lists and wait for decades, to be hired. This caused feelings of inter-generational injustice to younger people who had practically negligible cha...

The literature on how democratic polities deal with right-wing extremism focuses on political and institutional actors at the expense of societal agency. This article offers a corrective by analysing antifascist mobilisation against one of the most extreme parties in Europe, Golden Dawn in Greece. It uses in-depth interviews with antifascists to sk...

Recruiting participants through gatekeepers has been widely discussed in qualitative research. However, when a sampling frame is not available, surveying through gatekeepers can also be important for quantitative studies. We used three sampling methods to survey guardians of University students: (a) a gatekeeper variant of the time-space sampling,...

This longitudinal study (2002–2014) investigates the stability of rating characteristics of a large group of raters over time in the context of the writing paper of a national high-stakes examination. The study uses one measure of rater severity and two measures of rater consistency. The results suggest that the rating characteristics of individual...

This study investigates inter- and intracoder reliability, proposing a new approach based on social network analysis (SNA) and exponential random graph models (ERGM). During a recent exit poll, the responses of voters to two open-ended questions were recorded. A coding experiment was conducted where a group of coders coded a sample of text segments...

The way emotions affect political behavior has been a central theme in politics since ancient times, but it is only in the past few decades that it has been the focus of rigorous empirical inquiry. Recent empirical research suggests that emotions may affect different groups of people in distinct ways, but experimental evidence remains scant. Throug...

This study investigated to what extent two teams of experienced raters from different European countries (Finland and Austria), using their own CEFR-based rating scale (one holistic and one analytic), agreed on the CEFR level of students’ writing performances. Both teams rated one hundred performances written by Austrian secondary school students b...

Extending cue theory and arguments about heuristics, in this article we argue that in the European Union (EU) member states, trust in the EU acts as a proxy for trust in the United Nations. While existing studies have shown that citizens take cues from national political institutions in order to form an opinion about institutions at the transnation...

Research has shown that consistent family support improves higher education (HE) students’ chances for adjustment and graduation but family over-involvement negatively affects students’ well-being. We theoretically bridge three largely disjointed bodies of literature (namely, family ‘support’, ‘involvement’ and ‘over-involvement’) and show that fam...

Families have been getting more and more involved in their children’s education. This paper presents findings of a study investigating family involvement in their members’ undergraduate studies attending a state (non-fee-paying) and a private (fee-paying) university in Cyprus. The data presented in the paper were collected via online logs completed...

This article uses an original data set of 3262 party activities to examine how the local activism of a Greek far right party, the Golden Dawn, affected its electoral performance. Whereas most studies of activism focus on its intensity, this article examines how a neglected dimension, the consistency of activism, affects electoral outcomes. It also...

It is common practice for assessment programs to organize qualifying sessions during which the raters (often known as “markers” or “judges”) demonstrate their consistency before operational rating commences. Because of the high-stakes nature of many rating activities, the research community tends to continuously explore new methods to analyze ratin...

This article examines the effect of institutional grievances on extreme right voting by using an original survey to analyse voter support for the Greek Golden Dawn (GD). The article first examines various theories of extreme-right voting and then develops the concept of institutional grievances. Using structural equation modeling, it shows that tha...

Recent years have witnessed a rise of contentious political activity across 14 the world heralding what some perceive as a new major cycle of protest. Much attention 15 has focused on Europe, where the economic crisis generated considerable social unrest 16 deemed comparable to earlier waves of protest. This article seeks to examine the basic 17 co...

The literature on far right parties emphasizes the importance of party organization for electoral persistence. Yet, a lot is still unknown about the organizational development of these parties. This article examines the microdynamics of organizational development and explores why some party organizations succeed and others fail. It focuses on the l...

So far little has been done to explore similarities and differences between radical left parties and other traditionally perceived party families of the left at the societal level. A noticeable gap thus remains in the study of the European radical left: whether and in what ways social divides form the basis of radical left party support. Using data...

The purpose of this article is to explore crossing differential item functioning (DIF) in a test drawn from a national examination of mathematics for 11-year-old pupils in England. An empirical dataset was analyzed to explore DIF by gender in a mathematics assessment. A two-step process involving the logistic regression (LR) procedure for detecting...

Established literature suggests that language problems lead to lower attainment levels in those subjects that are more language dependent. Also, language has been suggested as a main driver of ethnic minority attainment. We use an original dataset of 2020 secondary school students to show that ethnic minority students in Cyprus underperform overall...

The economic crisis has meant that radical left parties in Europe have been faced with changing socioeconomic environments. In this study we examine how European radical left parties have responded to the crisis in terms of their societal mobilization strategies and seek to explain their responses. Discussions in the relevant literature advocate th...

Computer assisted self-interviewing (CASI) has been used around the world for a long time in order to achieve survey data collection with a reduced cost. CASI can also be useful when the intention is to reach groups of the population who are geographically dispersed, or who cannot be available to be interviewed during normal work hours. However, it...

Political trust can have a major impact on democratic politics by affecting political participation, institutional effectiveness, and policy choices. Given the significance of political trust for the functioning of democracy, it is important to know how the way citizens relate with political actors and institutions changes in times of extraordinary...

This chapter investigates and analyses contemporary research regarding political participation. An extensive discussion on different conceptualizations and definitions of political participation is presented, raising the issue pertaining to the distinction between conventional and unconventional political participation and showing why this distinct...

It has been frequently suggested that personal characteristics (e.g., language deficiencies, atypical schooling) may be responsible for the tendency of individuals to answer with aberrant response patterns to high stakes tests. This has not, however, been adequately validated using empirical data. This research uses datasets from seven mathematics,...

The aim of the article is to illustrate how researchers may use the lme4 package to run multilevel Rasch models. The lme4 package is a popular open-source software and is frequently used by researchers around the world to fit generalized mixed-effects models with crossed or partially crossed random effects. The article starts with a short discussio...

Cyprus is one of the European countries where the phenomenon of shadow education is particularly widespread. The political establishment, the Press and the teacher unions have repeatedly referred to shadow education as an anathema or a ‘cancer’ which makes public education and families suffer.

This study uses a subsample of 18 European countries of the first release of the dataset of the fifth round of the European Social Survey to investigate the factors that affect the desired age of retirement and the discrepancy between the actual and the desired age of retirement. We focus on a subsample of around 9,000 respondents in the age range...

This article describes briefly the education system of Cyprus and elaborates on the recent changes in its large-scale assessment (LSA) programme. Until 2005, two independent LSA programmes existed: one for school-graduation purposes and one for gaining entrance to higher education. The introduction of a dual-purpose LSA program in 2006, due to unex...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate factors that affect progression to university education across Europe. Design/methodology/approach The data used are obtained from the fourth round of the European Social Survey (2008). Findings Findings point to interesting age by gender and age by parental education interactions affecting the...

Researchers interested in exploring substantive group differences are increasingly attending to bundles of items (or testlets): the aim is to understand how gender differences, for instance, are explained by differential performances on different types or bundles of items, hence differential bundle functioning (DBF). Some previous work has modelled...

The population in Cyprus, a recent European Union member, has become much more heterogeneous during the past decade. Here, we examine the attainment patterns of minority and native students enrolled in six secondary schools from different cities in Cyprus, and identify factors responsible for these patterns. The combination of examined factors has...

The aims of this study are (a) to examine the sources of differential functioning by gender via differential bundle functioning (DBF) in mathematics assessment and (b) to use DBF to explore whether the differential functioning displayed is construct-relevant or construct-irrelevant. Three qualitatively different areas, namely curriculum domains, te...

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There is evidence that the attainment of ethnic minority children differs from that of native children. Examining this and the reasons behind it is important in ensuring equal opportunities and a sound education for all children. This paper identifies differences in attainment between minority and native students in Cyprus by examining the grades o...

Optimal Appropriateness Measurement (OAM) is a general statistical method for the identification of examinees whose test scores might not be a valid indicator of their true latent ability or trait. The method is statistically very powerful and it pinpoints towards the direction of the suspected aberrance instead of simply identifying that a specifi...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to position multinational companies on a linear continuum indicating their overall attitude towards standardisation/adaptation, examines the reasons influencing multinational companies' tactical (7Ps – marketing mix) behaviour towards it, and finally presents the underlying managerial implications of the results...

Heated discussions about the comparability of standards between examination subjects have kept Qualification Authorities, Testing Services, independent researchers and academics around the world busy for many years. As a result, many countries have adopted statistical techniques which aspire to make aggregated scores based on different subjects com...

This study investigates the effect of reporting the unadjusted raw scores in a high-stakes language exam when raters differ significantly in severity and self-selected questions differ significantly in difficulty. More sophisticated models, introducing meaningful facets and parameters, are successively used to investigate the characteristics of the...

Background: Athletics programmes for secondary schools include a variety of skills, knowledge and cognitive abilities, which are currently assessed through written, practical, oral and/or video-based tests. Skills are traditionally taught in practice-based sessions, while the knowledge aspect is often reinforced in class-based sessions with video/c...

This research investigates the stability of marker characteristics within a very short period of time for both tests on the same subject as well as tests on different subjects. It reports on the scoring of the scripts of the whole cohort of students that took three high stakes tests in 2003 in a European country: a Language test consisting of a Lit...

A large number of papers and technical reports are published every year describing researches where Rasch models are used. It has been observed, however, that not all the authors describe the application of the Rasch measurement with the same thoroughness. Some authors may leave behind important bits of information e.g. they may fail to investigate...

It is recommended that out of hours, surgery should be confined to emergency cases. What constitutes an emergency in orthopaedic surgery is not well defined. This study presents the results of a postal survey sent to orthopaedic surgeons practicing in the United Kingdom, asking them what is the time frame they would recommend operating upon, and wh...

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published following peer-review in Computers & Education, published by and copyright Elsevier. The Cultural Journeys in the Information Society is a dynamic hypermedia environment, which proposes the Electronic Roads as a meta-form for exploring cultura...

This article reports on an ongoing longitudinal investigation of the influence of professional development on teaching strategies. The study has so far identified models of type and duration of professional development activity for a national sample of primary subject co-ordinators and secondary heads of department of English, mathematics and scien...

The purpose of this report is to provide some data on the interests of primary school pupils. Year 3 6 pupils (N=240) responded to the Inventory of Children's Activities, a 30-item general interest questionnaire based on the hexagonal interest and personality typology of Holland. Responses to a 5-point scale were dichotomized and were analysed usin...

This study builds on a previous research on children's probability conceptions and misconceptions due to the representativeness heuristic. Rasch measurement methodology was used to analyse fresh data collected when a 10-item instrument (described by Afantiti Lamprianou and Williams, 2002, 2003) was administered to a new sample of 754 pupils and 99...

Research has suggested that inappropriate or misfitting response patterns may have detrimental effects on the quality and validity of measurement. It has been suggested that factors like language and ethnic background are related to the generation of misfitting response patterns, but the empirical research on this is rather poor. This research anal...

This paper examines reading achievement when the maternal/paternal language has become a de facto second language. The performance of a cohort of Greek- Australian high school students (N=270) on a diagnostic Greek reading test was significantly below that of pupils in second to fourth grades in Greece. The mean item difficulty for Greek-Australian...

A written paper (WP) and a video-based-paper (VP) were used to measure the learning outcomes of three experimental teaching units (ETUs) of athletics. The subjects (n=49) were 16 year olds. The ETUs represented three teaching environments; practice, practice and handouts, and class-based sessions. Pre and post-tests were administered for the conten...

In this research work we explored the nature of 9-12 year old pupils' responses to probability problems. Analysis of pupils' arguments in 'Explain why' questions uncovered their thinking strategies, which we compared for pupils of different age and gender. The results revealed the existence of subjective elements and other errors in pupils' probabi...