An essential feature of the linear logistic test model (LLTM) is that item difficulties are explained using item design properties. By taking advantage of this explanatory aspect of the LLTM, in a mixture extension of the LLTM, the meaning of latent classes is specified by how item properties affect item difficulties within each class. To improve…

High-ability students have special education needs that are often overlooked or misunderstood (Blaas in "Aust J Guid Couns" 24(2):243-255, 2014) which may result in talent loss (Saha and Sikora in "Int J Contemp Sociol Discuss J Contemp Ideas Res" 48(1):9-34, 2011). Educational acceleration can help avoid these circumstances…

Although traditional methods to collect similarity data (for multidimensional scaling [MDS]) are robust, they share a key shortcoming. Specifically, the possible pairwise comparisons in any set of objects grow rapidly as a function of set size. This leads to lengthy experimental protocols, or procedures that involve scaling stimulus subsets. We…

With approximately 30 million students the Chinese higher education system is the largest in the world. In every publicly funded institution there is a communist party secretary, however, little is known about these party secretaries. The purpose of the study was to understand who these people were. We collected data from 1,751 party secretaries…

In an attempt to influence students' appreciation of the value of research, the authors introduced a multidimensional scaling activity in a section of introductory psychology. In two consecutive 80-minute classes, 32 students worked in pairs, categorizing 20 crimes on the basis of similarity and coding their partner's responses, and then worked in…

Three different methods of data collection in which subjects judged proximity between object pairs were examined. One method required subjects to partition objects into homogeneous subsets; the second entailed rating object pairs on a similarity-dissimilarity continuum; and the third involved comparing interobject proximities to a fixed standard.…

Determined the extent to which direct judgments of similarity by supervisors and incumbents could provide the same job classification results as a more elaborate job analysis procedure. Results using hierarchical cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling analysis revealed that the global judgments and task-oriented data led to identical…

The current work examined age differences in the classification of novel object images that vary in continuous dimensions of structural shape. The structural dimensions employed are two that share a privileged status in the visual analysis and representation of objects: the shape of discrete prominent parts and the attachment positions of those…

Ranking and rating methods of making direct judgments of pairwise similarity are compared. Three dimensional configurations of seven objects are derived under both judgment methods across two equivalent groups of 59 university students. Using Cliff's orthogonal rotation method of multidimensional matching, comparisons are made between methods…

Compares two basic variants of the sorting method: single-sort and multiple sort. The nature of individual differences in sorting, as well as sex differences, were also investigated. Stimulus materials were the 15 mutually exclusive kinship terms selected by Wallace and Atkins (1960). (RC)

Two sets of real sorting data from 50 college students are used to compare results of multidimensional scaling of raw co-occurrence frequencies or dissimilarity measures (D) and profile distances (delta) to determine which yields a better representation of the underlying structure of 2 sets of stimuli. Slight differences are discussed. (SLD)

A model of graph comprehension is proposed including perceptual and memory processes. Multidimensional scaling (MDS), cluster analysis, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to determine how college students with different mathematical experience read different types of bar graphs. Data were collected at the University of Oklahoma (Norman)…

This study by two Ph.D. students in library science reviewed a systematic sample of the research literature in library and information science published in 62 core library journals in 1983 to order to identify substantive articles and compare their findings on research methodologies and trends with those reported in a similar study performed in…