The present study examined relationships between leisure interests and the Big Five personality traits, positive and negative affect, and moods. Regression analysis identified particular personality but not mood or affect variables as significant predictors of leisure factor scores. Further exploration through factor analysis revealed factor…

Many states currently offer bilingual certification or endorsement, encouraging both practicing teachers and prospective teachers to complete their requirements necessary to add this certification on to their regular teaching license. Although these requirements routinely include courses in bilingual education, the "second" language…

This study identified the characteristics of charismatic teaching behavior by interviewing deans, department chairs, teachers, and students at a midwestern state university. Based on interview data, a questionnaire was developed and administered to 19 classes, 10 taught by teachers recognized by the university for teaching merit and 9 teachers not…

The Inventario de Comportamiento de Estudio (ICE), a Spanish translation of the Study Behavior Inventory (SBI) was developed and tested using a group of 594 undergraduate students from randomly selected classes at a private comprehensive university in Mexico. Both instruments were designed to assess the study behaviors of students in institutions…

There has been a recognized need to understand the basis of quality teaching at the secondary school level. The Questionnaire on Teacher Interaction (QTI) was developed by T. Wubbels, H. A. Creton, and H. P. Hooymayers in the 1980s to address teaching quality at the high school level. A modified version of the QTI, the Professor Interpersonal…

Approximately 600 teachers in 32 public elementary schools and secondary schools from 1 urban southeastern school district participated in a study conducted to identify prototypes of school climate concerning decisional participation cultures. A 19-item decisional participation measure was used, and the median score of the teachers at each school…

A longitudinal study called The Home-School Study of Language and Literacy Development examined the relationships between the kinds of talk that children experience at home and school at ages 3 and 4 and measures of literate abilities at age 5. Subjects, 87 children in 2 cohorts of 42 and 45 children from low-income families living in the Boston,…

Interest in Total Quality Management (TQM) at institutions of higher education has been stressed in recent years as an important area of activity for institutional researchers. Two previous AIR Forum papers have presented some of the statistical and graphical methods used for TQM. This paper, the third in the series, first discusses some of the…

In an attempt to determine the subscale structures most useful for identifying adolescents with social skill deficits, this study investigated the factor structure of the Teenage Inventory of Social Skills (TISS) and its relationship to two measures of adolescent social competence. Two measures were completed by 1,142 ninth-grade students (577…

Researchers have often noted the desirability of investigating the incidence of academic misconduct of college students who will be in employment fields requiring a high level of competence and/or a high level of personal integrity, such as elementary school and secondary school teachers. The Academic Misconduct Survey (AMS) developed by Charlotte…

In Hong Kong there has been a move toward greater self-management in schools. The government has supported the School Management Initiatives scheme and has stated that the management system calls for teacher appraisal as one of its internal quality assurance mechanisms. This study examined the relationship between dimensions of school climate and…

Formal teacher appraisal was introduced to schools participating in Hong Kong's School Management Initiative (SMI) without prior evaluation of its effectiveness. This study examines the current practice of appraisal and provides guidelines for schools wishing to introduce teacher appraisal. Teachers from SMI schools (n=337) completed…

The relationship between factors underlying a measure of acculturation, the Acculturation Rating Scale for Mexican Americans (ARSMA), and the 566-item Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) was studied. The ARSMA consists of 20 questions that are scored on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from Mexican oriented (1) to Anglo oriented (5).…

Early childhood special educators recognize the necessity of establishing indices of reliability and validity for instruments that provide an index of developmental status. Many such instruments present little empirical evidence regarding psychometric integrity, particularly for a non-normative sample. The 341-item Battelle Developmental Inventory…

A scaling procedure is proposed, based on item response theory (IRT), to fit non-hierarchical test structure as well. The binary scores of a test of English were used for calculating the probabilities of answering each item correctly. The probability matrix was factor analyzed, and the difficulty intervals or estimates corresponding to the factors…