There is a need for valid and reliable instruments to assess learning outcomes in education for sustainable development (ESD). Measurement invariance (MI) needs to be established before results of these instruments can be validly compared between groups. Despite its importance, establishing MI is an often overlooked validation step. To provide an…

Children live complex social lives that has various aspects, including intimate friendships, peer-acceptance and bullying dynamics which is usually studied separately in research. This study aims to investigate the interplays of these three important fields by analyzing the moderating effects of number of friendships on the relation between…

Parents' judgment of their children's cognitive ability is important for providing adequate learning environments. This study examined parents' judgment accuracy with 2346 children (M = 8.94 years; 48.3% girls) and their parents (1283 mothers, 426 fathers, and 637 parental pairs). The data were collected between September 2012 and February 2014 in…

Lagged dependent variables (LDVs) are often used as predictors in ordinary least squares (OLS) models in the social sciences. Although several estimators are commonly employed, little is known about their relative merits in the presence of classical measurement error and different longitudinal processes. We assess the performance of four commonly…

Vertical scales are frequently developed using common item nonequivalent group linking. In this design, one can use upper-grade, lower-grade, or mixed-grade common items to estimate the linking constants that underlie the absolute measurement of growth. Using the Rasch model and a dataset from Curriculum Associates' i-Ready Diagnostic in math in…