Teaching reading has been an ongoing challenge for many educators across the United States. Numerous studies suggest that teachers feel they were not adequately prepared to teach reading and have low efficacy in delivering literacy instruction. Teaching reading requires educators to be knowledgeable about the alphabetic principle, decoding new…

The purpose of the current study is to examine the mediation role of academic achievement and absenteeism in the relationship between multidimensional amotivation and intention to school dropout among Turkish high school students. The results have shown that multidimensional amotivation has direct and indirect effects on intention to school…

The aim of the research presented here is the use of extensions of longitudinal item response theory (IRT) models in the analysis and comparison of group-specific growth in large-scale assessments of educational outcomes. A general discrete latent variable model was used to specify and compare two types of multidimensional item-response-theory…

Monte Carlo procedures were used to investigate the properties of a nonmetric multidimensional scaling algorithm when used to scale an incomplete matrix of dissimilarities. Recommendations for users wishing to scale incomplete matrices are made. (Author/RC)

When Torgerson's multidimensional scaling model is used in conjunction with the method of tetrads, derived coordinates are based on data which is assumed to be distributed normally. The object of this study was to determine the amount of error contained in derived coordinates when the normality assumption is violated. Torgerson coordinates were…

Evaluates the similarity of six statistical association measures in information retrieval by comparing the relationship and behavior they demonstrate in analyses of a test corpus. Highlights include comparisons of ranked term pairs and term clusters, multidimensional scaling, and the impact of term frequency on the association values by means of a…

Readiness skills of 1,261 kindergarten students were assessed with the use of the Kindergarten Instructional Design System (KIDS). The profile provides assessment in five areas: Motor, Visual, Auditory, Language, and Conceptual. Two statistical techniques were utilized to examine the underlying structure of the measure: factor analysis and…

Procedures for analyzing common item effects on interscale structure were reviewed and a study using smallest space analysis of the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) reported. Solutions of three matrices--intercorrelation matrix of the original CPI scales, of reduced scales (with common items removed), and of the number of common…

Examines the similarity between the coordinates which resulted when correlations were used as similarity measures and the factor loadings obtained by factor analyzing the same correlation matrix. Real data, a set of error free data, and some computer generated data containing deliberately introduced sampling error are analyzed. (RC)

Multidimensional scaling (MDS) and exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were compared in the assessment of the dimensionality of data sets, using sets generated to be one-dimensional or two-dimensional and differing in degree of interdimensional correlation and number of items defining a dimension. (SLD)

Academic psychology has long been composed of two disciplines, one experimental and one correlational. These two disciplines each developed their own method of studying structure in data: multidimensional scaling (MDS) and factor analysis. Both methods use similar kinds of input data, proximity measures on object pairs. Both represent the object…

Performed correlational and multidimensional scaling analyses to assess the similarity between two models. Results support the similarity in structure between the people-things dimension from Holland's RIASEC (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) model with the affiliation dimension from Wiggins' interpersonal…

The question of whether test factor structure is indicative of the test item hierarchy was examined. Data from 1,000 subjects on two sets of five bivalued Law School Admission Test items, which were analyzed with latent trait methods of Bock and Lieberman and of Christoffersson in Psychometrika, were analyzed with an ordering-theoretic method to…

Reports results of a comparison of correlational and multidimensional scaling techniques as tools for analyzing the perceptions of three groups of mathematics teachers (at high school, vocational school, and university levels) of the relative importance of curricular objectives. Discusses the relationship of the two analyses and the implications…

The following seven statistical procedures are compared in terms of the ability to recover a unidimensional latent trait from Likert-type data: (1) factor analysis based on Pearson correlations (FA-PR); (2) factor analysis based on polychoric correlations (FA-PL); (3) the graded response model in item response theory (IRT-GRM); (4) internal…