The possible dependency of criterion validity on item formulation in a multicomponent measuring instrument is examined. The discussion is concerned with evaluation of the differences in criterion validity between two or more groups (populations/subpopulations) that have been administered instruments with items having differently formulated item…

Two studies were conducted to investigate how self-ratings on questionnaire items reflect the underlying real-scores. Participants gave numerical information about personal attributes (the real-scores), such as age, height, and weight, and subsequently rated themselves regarding these attributes. In Study 1, they rated themselves on a five-point…

Converging evidence of high stress levels in the nursing profession as well as their detrimental effects on the execution of nursing actions, quality indicators of care, and self-reported job satisfaction justify the need for test environments that assess stress coping competences in dealing with domain-specific stress factors. Reliable and valid…

It can be suggested that pre-service primary school teachers' sense of belonging to science may be influential to their professionalization within university-based teacher education programs, which intend to prepare them for teaching natural sciences in primary school. Nevertheless, because only few studies have examined teachers' sense of…

Social, emotional, and behavioral (SEB) skills comprise a broad set of abilities that are essential for building and maintaining relationships, regulating emotions, selecting and pursuing goals, or exploring novel stimuli. Toward an improved SEB skill assessment, Soto and colleagues recently introduced the Behavioral, Emotional, and Social Skills…

Improving the effectiveness of teacher professional development programmes is crucial for enhancing education, and assessing teacher professional competence is vital. This study aimed at adapting and validating instruments originally developed in Germany as part of a follow-up study to TEDS-M (Teacher Education Development Study-Mathematics),…

Broadly understood, values represent orientation guidelines for daily action, thinking, and feeling. Thus, they affect teachers' everyday work and are among their professional competencies. While general values and some single profession-specific values of teachers (e.g., responsibility) have already been investigated empirically, the current…

As stress in students has increased in the last years, factors predicting stress need to be investigated. The aim of the present study was to replicate previous findings using the demand-control model and to examine the role of emotional distress in a transactional model (inspired by Lazarus' transactional stress model). "Stress, mental…

This quantitative study developed a measurement instrument, The Assessment of Historical Perspective-Taking (AHPT), to evaluate historical perspective-taking skills among 15- and 16-year-old students within their United States History classes by adapting an existing measurement instrument developed in Germany. Applying a theoretical framework that…

In randomized experiments, inventories with reverse-keyed items are compared with inventories in which all the items are either positively or negatively associated with the underlying concept. The results show that with reverse keying, a control of the potential bias was not sufficient; likewise, the factorial structure, reliability, and validity…

Purpose: Our purpose was to explore the validity and reliability of the German Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS-G; Thomas-Stonell, Oddson, Robertson, & Rosenbaum, 2010, 2012), which is an authorized adaptation of the Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (Thomas-Stonell et al., 2010) tool, which measures…

A key challenge for teachers is the evaluation of teaching and learning situations in the classroom. Video-based instruments are considered as effective tools for measuring teachers' skills for evaluating classroom situations. This article reports the development and validation of a video-based assessment tool for measuring biology teachers'…

Two different tools for assessing pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of mathematics teachers used in the framework of the COACTIV study are systematically compared in this paper, namely the paper-and-pencil test consisting of items on the three facets "knowledge of explaining and representation," "knowledge of student thinking and…

Scientific reasoning abilities are already developing in elementary-school-aged children and enable them to understand the world around them. The goal of the current study was to develop a new instrument for 8- to 10-year-old children in Grades 3 and 4 to measure their understanding of the steps of the "scientific inquiry cycle" (SIC).…

The Thinking Styles Inventories (TSI) are questionnaires for assessing individual preferences in constructing knowledge. This paper identifies several problems concerning their validity, which range from an inadequate use of factor analysis, to missing information on the measurement model, to findings indicating a low discrimination between the…