The notably low level of reading proficiency across the United States, combined with the known importance of teachers for student success, necessitates improved understanding of teachers' knowledge, how it is acquired, and its role in instruction. This study had four goals: (1) identify whether domains of content knowledge and pedagogical content…

Marginalized youth's development occurs in contexts rife with racialized, gendered, and socioeconomic social identity threats and barriers to social mobility. An emergent line of inquiry suggests critical action--a component of critical consciousness, defined as engaging in individual or collective social action to produce social change--may…

Background: Both education policies and curriculum documents identify the personal development of students as a key objective of modern education. Physical education (PE) in particular has been cited as a subject that can promote students' life skills development and psychological well-being. However, little research has investigated the processes…

This study examined the reliability and validity of the Classroom Assessment Scoring System-Secondary (CLASS-S) in Finnish classrooms. Trained observers coded classroom interactions based on video recordings of 46 Grade 6 classrooms (450 cycles). Concurrent associations were investigated with respect to teacher self-ratings (e.g., efficacy beliefs…

Students' attitudes toward mathematics and its learning have been subject to numerous studies in the past six decades. These studies treat such attitudes as both desirable learning outcomes and correlates of mathematics achievement. Many Likert-type attitude scales have been devised to measure significant constructs underlying mathematics-related…

Factor analysis is a statistical method for describing the associations among sets of observed variables in terms of a small number of underlying continuous latent variables. Various authors have proposed multilevel extensions of the factor model for the analysis of data sets with a hierarchical structure. These Multilevel Factor Models (MFMs)…

Current reviews outside of sport indicate that the Life Orientation Test-Revised (LOT-R) items load on two separate factors (optimism and pessimism) and, therefore, should be treated as independent constructs. However, researchers in the sport sciences continue to use the single composite score reflecting a unidimensional definition of optimism.…

The Multicultural Teaching Competencies Inventory (MTCI) contains items based on the tri-parte model of cultural competencies established by Sue and associates (Sue et al., 1992, 1982, 2003) that identify multicultural Awareness, Knowledge, and Skill as central characteristics of a culturally sensitive professional. The development and validation…

Interest in heart rate variability (HRV) metrics as markers of physiological and psychological health continues to grow beyond those with psychophysiological expertise, increasing the importance of developing suitable tools for researchers new to the field. Allen, Chambers, and Towers (2007) developed QRSTool and CMetX software as simple,…

The Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) has dominated self-regulated learning research since the early 1990s. In this study, the two MSLQ subscales specifically designed to assess self-regulation--Metacognitive Self-Regulation subscale and Effort Regulation subscale--were examined. Results indicated that the structure of the two…

A measure of "clusterability" serves as the basis of a new methodology designed to preserve cluster structure in a reduced dimensional space. Similar to principal component analysis, which finds the direction of maximal variance in multivariate space, principal cluster axes find the direction of maximum clusterability in multivariate space.…

The purposes of this study were to explore the structure of coping with everyday stressors in a young nonclinical population and examine the relationship between coping and mental health. A total of 1324 children from 91 second-grade classes in 35 schools participated. Mental health was assessed using the parent and teacher forms of the Strengths…

A new approach to identify item clusters fitting the Rasch model is described and evaluated using simulated and real data. The proposed method is based on hierarchical cluster analysis and constructs clusters of items that show a good fit to the Rasch model. It thus gives an estimate of the number of independent scales satisfying the postulates of…

The aim of this study was to evaluate possible consequences of using unidimensional item response theory (UIRT) on a multidimensional college admission test. The test consists of 5 subscales and can be divided into two sections, that is, it can be considered both as a unidimensional and a multidimensional test. The test was examined with both UIRT…

The study presented here is an attempt to calculate a comparative multidimensional index of economic well-being for the Spanish Autonomous Communities. Based on the dimensions of adjusted consumption, real wealth, equity and economic security per inhabitant, we obtain one relative index using a system of uniform weightings, a second resulting from…