Various educational mandates, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and educational approaches, such as Response to Intervention (RTI) and Positive Behavior Supports (PBS), require use of objective data to inform decision making for academics and behavior. However, some traditional…

This article is a forum response to a research article on self-reporting methods when studying discrete emotions in science education environments. Studying emotions in natural settings is a difficult task because of the complexity of deciphering verbal and non-verbal communication. In my response I present three main points that build on insights…

The affect regulation model of binge eating, which posits that patients binge eat to reduce negative affect (NA), has received support from cross-sectional and laboratory-based studies. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) involves momentary ratings and repeated assessments over time and is ideally suited to identify temporal antecedents and…

Social skills training (SST) is an evidence-based intervention to help increase social competence for students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), but there is limited research that addresses SST for students identified as experiencing EBD at alternative campuses. A mixed methods design was utilized to examine SST at an alternative…

Although studies investigating the validity of positive affectivity and negative affectivity in children have been supportive, investigations of changes in the structure of affect across childhood have demonstrated mixed results. The current study used confirmatory factor analytic techniques to test one-factor, two-factor correlated, and…

Measurement of affective states in everyday life is of fundamental importance in many types of quality of life, health, and psychological research. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is the recognized method of choice, but the respondent burden can be high. The day reconstruction method (DRM) was developed by Kahneman and colleagues ("Science,"…

The Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) is a frequently used scale for measuring depressive severity. BDI-II data (404 clinical; 695 nonclinical adults) were analyzed by means of confirmatory factor analysis to test whether the factor structure model with a somatic-affective and cognitive component of depression, formulated by Beck and…

Significant life experience research suggests that outdoor experiences foster proenvironmental outcomes. Time spent outdoors is more frequently identified as the source of proenvironmental behavior than is education, suggesting that cognition may be less important than affect. Yet, environmental education field programs are often evaluated on…

Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, the aims were (a) to obtain, describe, and compare different solutions of three, five, and six first-order factors raised in the previous literature about the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI); (b) analyze the number and nature of the second-order factors; (c) test which model best reproduces…

Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS) Modules 1-3 item and domain total distributions were reviewed for 1,630 assessments of children aged 14 months to 16 years with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or with heterogeneous non-spectrum disorders. Children were divided by language level and age to yield more homogeneous cells. Items were…

Patterns of change in parental support, behavioral control, and psychological control were examined longitudinally across adolescence.

Strong associations between civilian posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) scales and measures of general psychological distress suggest that the scales are nonspecific to PTSD. Three common PTSD scales were administered to 122 undergraduates who had experienced an emotionally salient, nontraumatic event: a college examination. Results indicated…

Two studies investigated upper elementary school students' informal understanding of sampling issues in the context of interpreting and evaluating survey results. The specific focus was on the children's evaluation of sampling methods and means of drawing conclusions from multiple surveys. In Study 1, 17 children were individually interviewed to…

Unintended effects of evaluation are discussed, with reference to the Hawthorne Effect, where unintended effects overshadow the manipulations controlled by researchers. Unintended effects are categorized as (1) affective reactions; (2) political dimensions; (3) importance of individual differences; and (4) expectations concerning evaluation.…

In recent years, several investigators have examined trends in the antecedent research literature through discussion of key conceptual models considered to guide this research (Conroy & Stichter, 2003; Smith & Iwata, 1997; Smith, Iwata, & Michael, 2000) as well as related trends in measurement (Mahon, Shores, & Buske, 1999). Despite varied points…