The purpose of the first study was to develop and validate a new self-report survey used to determine the level of agentic, behavioral, cognitive, and emotional engagement of eighth and ninth grade boys and girls in physical education. Much of the development was driven by work completed by Reeve and Tseng (2011), and by Reeve (2013). Two hundred…

A scale for measuring self-efficacy for teaching mathematics in grades 5 to 10 was developed in this study for teachers in Oman. The participants were 328 mathematics teachers randomly selected from five educational governorates in the Sultanate of Oman. Factorial structure of the scale revealed three subscales: self-efficacy for understanding the…

The purpose of this study was to establish the reliability and validity of the scores on a brief strengths-based assessment, the 22-item Personal Strengths Inventory (PSI). In Study 1, findings from exploratory factor analysis of 410 adolescents provided evidence for a five-factor solution--social competence (four items), emotional awareness (five…

This article reports the adaptation and analysis of Pintrich's Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) in Hong Kong. First, this study examined the psychometric qualities of the existing Chinese version of MSLQ (MSLQ-CV). Based on this examination, this study developed a revised Chinese version of MSLQ (MSLQ-RCV) for junior…

The present study reported on the modification of the Basic Psychological Needs in Exercise Scale (Vlachopoulos & Michailidou, 2006) to assess students' psychological need fulfillment in elementary school, middle school, and high school compulsory physical education classes. Data were collected from 817 5th and 6th grade students, 862 middle…

The articles in this special issue make two important contributions to our understanding of the impact of accommodations on test score validity. First, they illustrate a variety of methods for collection and rigorous analyses of empirical data that can supplant expert judgment of the impact of accommodations. These methods range from internal…

This study investigates the factorial invariance of the statewide science tests at the middle school level across the oral administration accommodation and nonaccommodated groups of students with and without disabilities. Results indicate that the factor loadings and error variances are invariant across groups, although the oral administration and…

The purpose of this study was to test the validity of scores on the Homework Management Scale (HMS) using 699 rural and 482 urban eighth graders. The study revealed that the HMS comprised 5 separate yet related factors: arranging the environment, managing time, handling distraction, monitoring motivation, and controlling emotion. Given an adequate…

In practice, vertical scales have been continually used to measure students' achievement progress across several grade levels and have been considered very challenging psychometric procedures. Recently, such practices have been drawing many criticisms. The major criticisms focus on dimensionality and construct equivalence of the latent trait or…

This study investigated the convergent and discriminant validity of the high-stakes Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) in both reading and writing at grade levels 4, 8, and 10. The data from the 2006 FCAT administration were analyzed via traditional multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) analysis to identify the factor structure and structural…

English language learners (ELLs) constitute one of the fastest growing subpopulations of students in the United States. It is important to determine whether the assessments used by states in determining students' proficiencies are valid and fair for ELLs. This study focused on several standards-based assessments in mathematics and science…

The development and validation of a measure of adolescent future expectations associated with work, education, family, health, and church/community participation is presented. The 25-item measure was administered to a sample of 389 7th- to 12th-grade urban poor and working-class Chilean students. Results of an exploratory principal axis factor…

Validity data are presented for a new measure of threat appraisals in response to community violence. Adolescents (N = 358; 45% male; 91% African American, M = 12.10 years, SD = 1.63) and their maternal caregivers participated in two waves of a longitudinal interview study focused on the consequences of exposure to community violence. Structural…