Corporate reforms have taken place in Australian and Chinese higher education systems to increase efficiency and productivity, and to accommodate the emergence of global markets by exposing universities to market competition. The competing demands of teaching and research arguably have emerged as an important issue for both Australian and Chinese…

Education systems around the world need to recruit highly motivated individuals to become teachers and prepare professionally competent teacher education graduates to take up these broadened and deepened roles and responsibilities with a deep and lasting engagement to the profession. This article reports on a mixed-methods study that examines…

Teachers' attitudes and beliefs on classroom management contribute significantly to student learning and development. Despite its importance, research in this aspect, however, has still been stymied by the difficulty of measuring teachers' classroom management attitudes and beliefs. Psychometrically sound instruments to measure teachers' classroom…

Classroom assessment tasks and environment are central to supporting student learning, yet are under-studied at the tertiary level, especially in China's test-driven culture. This study explores the relationship between students' perceptions of assessment tasks and classroom assessment environment, within the university context of teaching English…

Successful coping with academic demands is important given the inverse relationship between stress and positive adjustment in adolescents. The Coping with Academic Demands Scale (CADS) is a new measure of coping appropriate for students pursuing advanced high school curricula, specifically Advanced Placement (AP) classes and the International…

The differences between male and female students in the field of education can be studied from several points of view. The aim of the present study is to approach the issues of mobility closely connected to the educational institution, institutional existence and school, using the filter of value sociology, thus bringing us closer to the different…

Objectives: To determine whether changes in food patterns over a period of 6 years were related to obesity in Tehranian adults. Design: Data on dietary intake, using the food frequency questionnaire, and anthropometry were obtained in 2 periods of the survey (1999-2001 and 2005-2007). Setting: Participants of the Tehran Lipid and Glucose Study.…

Recent demographic trends suggest that grandparents may play influential roles in the lives of their grandchildren. Despite this, the role of grandparents in the lives of youth remains an understudied topic. Using data from a nationally representative group of youth aged 14 to 19 years from the 1992 Wave 2 National Survey of Families and…

Reliability of test scores is one of the most pervasive psychometric concepts in measurement. Reliability coefficients based on a unifactor model for continuous indicators include maximal reliability rho and an unweighted sum score-based omega, among many others. With increasing popularity of item response theory, a parallel reliability measure pi…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop a measurement instrument for individual entrepreneurial orientation to be used to measure the entrepreneurial orientation of students and other individuals. Design/methodology/approach: A measure of Individual Entrepreneurial Orientation (IEO) was generated, validated, and then tested on 1,100…

Model-based attempts to rigorously study the broad and imprecise concept of "discriminating power" are scarce, and generally limited to nonlinear models for binary responses. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework for assessing the discriminating power of item and test scores which are analyzed or obtained using Spearman's…

The aim of this research was to develop the Mobbing Impacts Scale and to examine its validity and reliability analyses. The sample of study consisted of 509 teachers from Sakarya. In this study construct validity, internal consistency, test-retest reliabilities and item analysis of the scale were examined. As a result of factor analysis for…

Maximum likelihood and Bayesian ability estimation in multidimensional item response models can lead to paradoxical results as proven by Hooker, Finkelman, and Schwartzman ("Psychometrika" 74(3): 419-442, 2009): Changing a correct response on one item into an incorrect response may produce a higher ability estimate in one dimension.…

Content analysis of mass media publications has become a major scientific method used to analyze public discourse on climate change. We propose a computer-assisted content analysis method to extract prevalent themes and analyze discourse changes over an extended period in an objective and quantifiable manner. The method includes the following: (1)…

This study statistically investigates the characteristics of the intended curriculum for Japanese primary science, focusing on the learning content. The study used the TIMSS 2011 Grade 4 Curriculum Questionnaire data as a major source for the learning content prescribed at the national level. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to determine the…