A fundamental premise in assessment is that the underlying construct is equivalent across different groups of students and that this structure does not vary over years. The pandemic has potentially impacted opportunity to learn and disrupted the internal structure of assessments in various ways. Past research has suggested that students tended to…

Real world data often fail to meet the underlying assumption of population normality. The Rank Transformation (RT) procedure has been recommended as an alternative to the parametric factorial analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA). The purpose of this study was to compare the Type I error and power properties of the RT ANCOVA to the parametric procedures…

The central objective of factor analysis is to explain the greatest amount of variance in a data set with the smallest number of factors. Higher-order analysis is an invaluable tool that offers the benefit of parsimony provided by first-order analysis with the opportunity to make data-based generalizations beyond the first-order. Higher-order…

International studies like PISA use context student or school questionnaires to collect data on student family background, attitudes and learning context. Questionnaire constructs are typically measured using dichotomous or Likert-type items. Scaling of questionnaire items in order to obtain measures of family background, student attitudes or…

A study was designed to identify the underlying dimensions of the barriers and facilitators to the linkage of vocational education and registered apprenticeship programs. It was anticipated that knowledge of the factors derived from identified barriers and facilitators would provide assistance in the development of models designed to establish…

In an earlier study, I. Newman and D. Waechter (1999) investigated graduate education students' perceptions and attitudes toward cheating in scientific research. A questionnaire was developed that was based on reactions and concerns related to cheating behavior seen in a public television video about faking scientific data. This study examined the…

This study examined the internal consistency of the Student Satisfaction Inventory (SSI) (L. Schrener, S. Juillerat, and Noel-Levitz Group, 1997) and the latent structures of the instrument. The SSI is an instrument that measures students' satisfaction with their college experiences. The SSI was administered to 251 students randomly selected from…

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, it investigated preservice and inservice teachers' observed and experienced violence at various educational levels. Second, the study determined by gender, these individuals' knowledge and awareness of violence factors. The subjects consisted of 26 university preservice and four inservice teachers in…

The multiplicity of variables describing the financial conditions of postsecondary institutions makes it difficult to assess changes in higher education finance from year to year and to find the relationship between these finance variables and average faculty salaries. This study sought to determine if a small number of factors could be derived to…

Career decision making is an important aspect of life. At some point one must decide what type of job to apply for or whether to seek education for a specific career. Many individuals struggle with these decisions. Unfortunately, multidimensional measures of uncertainty are needed in providing guidance to such persons, because it appears the…

Recent developments in dichotomous factor analysis based on multidimensional item response models (Bock and Aitkin, 1981; Muthen, 1978) provide an effective method for exploring the dimensionality of questionnaire items. Implemented in the TESTFACT program, this "full information" item factor analysis accounts not only for the pairwise…

A study sought to determine what relationships existed between speech rate, speech pitch variation, speech loudness, and the personality assessments made by listeners. The subjects, 214 undergraduate speech communication students, listened to one of eight tape recordings made by a male speaker to represent all the combinations of the three…

Adapting credentialing examinations for international uses involves translating tests for use in multiple languages. This paper explores methods for evaluating construct equivalence and item equivalence across different language versions of a test. These methods were applied to four different language versions (English, French, German, and…

Over the past 15 years a body of research has investigated organizational transitions in adolescent development. Researchers studying school transitions exclusively ask whether significant transition affects students' social and psychological development. To test the presence of transition effects, researchers have typically observed mean…

The original "Bayley Scales of Infant Development" (BSID) (Bayley 1969) have been among the most popular measures of performance and aptitude of infants. In the present study the reliability and construct validity of mental and motor scores on the revised Bayley Scales of Infant Development-II (BSID-II) were investigated. A national…