The study aims to examine the interplay of two critical constructs in evaluation: essential evaluator competency and evaluator practice. The research questions in this study, according to Smith (2008), are essentially, what he defined as "fundamental issues in evaluation." These issues fall into one or multiple of the four aspects…

Evaluating the psychometric properties of a newly developed instrument is critical to understanding how well an instrument measures what it intends to measure, and ensuring proposed use and interpretation of questionnaire scores are valid. The current study uses Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) techniques to examine the factorial structure and…

The relationships that students have with their parents and peers permeate their lives both inside and outside of the classroom. The purpose of the present exploratory study is to assess (a) the psychometric quality of measures gauging the latent variables of adolescents' perceptions of their relatedness to both parents and peers and (b) the…

Scores from value-added models (VAMs), as used for educational accountability, represent the educational effect teachers have on their students. The use of these scores in teacher evaluations for high-stakes decision making is new for the State of Florida. Validity evidence that supports or questions the use of these scores is critically needed.…

This study leveraged the complementary nature of confirmatory factor (CFA), item response theory (IRT), and latent class (LCA) analyses to strengthen the rigor and sophistication of evaluation of two new measures of the Air Force Academy's "leader of character" definition--the Character Mosaic Virtues (CMV) and the Leadership Mosaic…

From the beginning, lead methodologists in psychometrics and quantitative psychology have been well aware of the problems of fitting structural and confirmatory factor models. The question we approach in our research is how to best detect this misfit and how to identify specific sources of misfit by scrutinizing the data at the case level. Since…

The Internet has changed not only how we conceptualize knowledge, but also how we learn in classroom. Knowledge is not any longer transmitted from experts to non-experts, but is constructed through communication, collaboration, and integration among a network of people. In this context, teachers are expected to facilitate student-centered learning…

The theoretical argument of the current research is that athletic departments have been effective in attaining their conflicting goals mainly because they have become highly effective in managing institutional rules. Neo-institutionalism (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991), loose coupling (Meyer & Rowan, 1977), and patterns of bureaucracy (Gouldner, 1954)…