This paper is concerned with the process of selecting between the increasingly popular bi-factor model and the second-order factor model in measurement research. It is indicated that in certain settings widely used in empirical studies, the second-order model is nested in the bi-factor model and obtained from the latter after imposing appropriate…

Conceptualizing two-variable disturbances preventing good model fit in confirmatory factor analysis as item-level method effects instead of correlated residuals avoids violating the principle that residual variation is unique for each item. The possibility of representing such a disturbance by a method factor of a bifactor measurement model was…

Percentage of uncontaminated correlations (PUC), explained common variance (ECV), and omega hierarchical ([omega]H) have been used to assess the degree to which a scale is essentially unidimensional and to predict structural coefficient bias when a unidimensional measurement model is fit to multidimensional data. The usefulness of these indices…

The population relationship between coefficient alpha and scale reliability is studied in the widely used setting of unidimensional multicomponent measuring instruments. It is demonstrated that for any set of component loadings on the common factor, regardless of the extent of their inequality, the discrepancy between alpha and reliability can be…

In this study, we estimated the relationship between two popular measures of teacher effectiveness--teachers' value-added model (VAM) estimates, represented in this study via median growth percentiles (MGPs), and teachers' observational scores, derived from the TAP System for Teacher and Student Advancement. We examined the relationship between…

A class of effect size indices are discussed that evaluate the degree to which two nested confirmatory factor analysis models differ from each other in terms of fit to a set of observed variables. These descriptive effect measures can be used to quantify the impact of parameter restrictions imposed in an initially considered model and are free…

Topic models are mathematical and statistical models used to analyze textual data. The objective of topic models is to gain information about the latent semantic space of a set of related textual data. The semantic space of a set of textual data contains the relationship between documents and words and how they are used. Topic models are becoming…

The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) is one of the most widely used instruments to measure students' motivation and self-regulated learning. However, the MSLQ was developed and has been predominantly used in the Western context, is a domain-general measure, and is quite lengthy. Hence, adapting the MSLQ to the Chinese…

Purpose and Background: Despite the flexibility of multilevel structural equation modeling (MLSEM), a practical limitation many researchers encounter is how to effectively estimate model parameters with typical sample sizes when there are many levels of (potentially disparate) nesting. We develop a method-of-moment corrected maximum likelihood…

Abundant research in social psychology shows human behaviour is guided by beliefs through two pathways, a deliberate and automatic pathway. Research on student motivation has thus far focused mostly on the deliberate pathway and consequently almost exclusively relied on explicit measures (i.e. self-reports of motivation) to assess student…

Based upon self-concept and self-determination theory, the present study aimed to examine the measurement separability of young children's math self-concept (MSC) and six specific types of motivation, namely, intrinsic motivation (INTR), integrated motivation (INTEG), identified motivation (IDENT), introjected motivation, extrinsic motivation…

Purpose: Vocal roughness is often present in many voice disorders but the assessment of roughness mainly depends on the subjective auditory-perceptual evaluation and lacks acoustic correlates. This study aimed to apply the concept of roughness in general sound quality perception to vocal roughness assessment and to characterize the relationship…

In conversation, "uptake" happens when a speaker builds on the contribution of their interlocutor by, for example, acknowledging, repeating or reformulating what they have said. In education, teachers' uptake of student contributions has been linked to higher student achievement. Yet measuring and improving teachers' uptake at scale is…

This research aimed at creating a structural model of the indicators of Educational Leadership for Primary School Principals in Thailand, which is considered to be a theoretical model that has been used to test for coherence with the empirical data collected from a sample group of 580 participants, who were selected from 30,719 Primary School…

In this paper we compare two approaches to measuring the average rate at which students learn in a given school or district. One type of measure--longitudinal growth measures--relies on student-level longitudinal data. A second type--cohort growth measures--relies only on repeated aggregated, cross-sectional data. Because student-level data is…