This study examined predictors of the quality of parental homework involvement and reciprocal relations between the quality of parental homework involvement and students' reading achievement and academic functioning in a reading-intensive subject (German). Data from 2,830 students in nonacademic tracks and their parents who were surveyed in both…

The most popular measures of multidimensional constructs typically fail to meet standards of good measurement: goodness of fit, measurement invariance, lack of differential item functioning, and well-differentiated factors that are not so highly correlated as to detract from their discriminant validity. Part of the problem, the authors argue, is…

Research on the relation between students' achievement (ACH) and their academic self-concept (ASC) has consistently shown a Big-Fish-Little-Pond-Effect (BFLPE); ASC is positively affected by individual ACH, but negatively affected by school-average ACH. Surprisingly, however, there are few good UK studies of the BFLPE and few anywhere in the world…

In modern expectancy-value theory (EVT) in educational psychology, expectancy and value beliefs additively predict performance, persistence, and task choice. In contrast to earlier formulations of EVT, the multiplicative term Expectancy x Value in regression-type models typically plays no major role in educational psychology. The present study…

Being schooled with other high-achieving peers has a detrimental influence on students' self-perceptions: School-average and class-average achievement have a negative effect on academic self-concept and career aspirations--the big-fish-little-pond effect. Individual achievement, on the other hand, predicts academic self-concept and career…

NEO instruments are widely used to assess Big Five personality factors, but confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) conducted at the item level do not support their a priori structure due, in part, to the overly restrictive CFA assumptions. We demonstrate that exploratory structural equation modeling (ESEM), an integration of CFA and exploratory…

Existing research posits multiple dimensions of bullying and victimization but has not identified well-differentiated facets of these constructs that meet standards of good measurement: goodness of fit, measurement invariance, lack of differential item functioning, and well-differentiated factors that are not so highly correlated as to detract…