With the ongoing development of technology and its ever increasing influence in the social and educational spheres, knowing whether users will embrace technological means is of considerable importance. This article looks at Willingness to Use Technology (WUT; MacLean & Elwood, 2009), an instrument developed to assess a potential technology…

Schools often administer brief intelligence tests as the first step in the identification of students who are cognitively gifted. However, brief measures are often used without consideration of underlying constructs or the psychometric properties of the measures and without regard to the links between screening decisions and educational…

Background: The nosology of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is at a critical point in history as the field seeks to better define dimensions of social-communication deficits and restricted/repetitive behaviors on an individual level for both clinical and neurobiological purposes. These different dimensions also suggest an increasing need for…

This paper proposes a semiparametric Bayesian framework for the analysis of associations among multivariate longitudinal categorical variables in high-dimensional data settings. This type of data is frequent, especially in the social and behavioral sciences. A semiparametric hierarchical factor analysis model is developed in which the…

This paper seeks to understand the criteria which students use to evaluate teaching effectiveness. Using structural equation modeling with a sample of business students from Egypt, the findings indicate that the above criteria comprise six factors: organization of the course, fairness of grading, workload difficulty, student-instructor…

Conceptualisations of disability that emphasise the contextual and cultural nature of disability and the embodiment of these within a national system of data collection present a number of challenges especially where this process is devolved to schools. The requirement for measures based on contextual and subjective experiences gives rise to…

Human abilities in perceptual domains have conventionally been described with reference to a threshold that may be defined as the maximum amount of stimulation which leads to baseline performance. Traditional psychometric links, such as the probit, logit, and "t", are incompatible with a threshold as there are no true scores corresponding to…

C. S. Carver and E. Harmon-Jones have presented considerable evidence to support their argument that "anger relates to an appetitive or approach motivational system, whereas anxiety relates to an aversive or avoidance motivational system" (p. 183). However, they have failed to take sufficient account of the extensive psychometric data indicating…

The generalized logit-linear item response model (GLLIRM) is a linearly constrained nominal categories model (NCM) that computes the scale and intercept parameters for categories as a weighted sum of basic parameters. This paper addresses the problems of the identifiability of the basic parameters and the equivalence between different GLLIRM…

The Social Relationships Index (SRI) was designed to examine positivity and negativity in social relationships. Unique features of this scale include its brevity and the ability to examine relationship positivity and negativity at the level of the specific individual and social network. The SRI's psychometric properties were examined in three…

Strengthening the association between education and communication is difficult due to the scarcity of educationally initiated research into the mechanics of communication. Most of the existing communication research is domiciled in the departments of sociology, psychology, anthropology, journalism and business. Many educators are satisfied in…

This study examined psychometric properties of the MCCI (Millon College Counseling Inventory) (T. Millon, Strack, C. Millon, & Grossman, 2006), as applied to students from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds. The sample (N = 209, Mean age = 23.81, 74% identified as ethnic minority) was derived from students presented for counseling…

This paper describes methods for an alignment study and psychometric analyses of a formative assessment system, Diagnoser Tools for physics. Diagnoser Tools begin with facet clusters as the interpretive framework for designing questions and instructional activities. Thus each question in the diagnostic assessments includes distractors that…

In theoretical models of self-regulated learning, calibration is one important component in successful learning. Two issues of calibration are explored. First, Nelson (1987) suggested the "G" (gamma) coefficient is the most appropriate measure of calibration (judgment accuracy) and rejected signal detection theory's "d'"…

Over the past few decades, those who take tests in the United States have exhibited increasing diversity with respect to native language. Standard psychometric procedures for ensuring item and test fairness that have existed for some time were developed when test-taking groups were predominantly native English speakers. A better understanding of…