Background: Recent literature on emotions in education has shown that competence- and value-related beliefs are important sources of students' emotions; nevertheless, the role of these antecedents in students' daily functioning in the classroom is not yet well-known. More importantly, to date we know little about intra-individual variability in…

The Adolescent Responses to Alcohol and Drug Offers Scale (ARADOS) is a self-report questionnaire designed to assess a respondent's anticipated emotional reactions and intended use of cognitive-behavioral refusal skills in response to an offer of alcohol or other drug. A sample of 267 students enrolled in the 11th and 12th grades of four public…

Objective: The Coordinators of Psychiatric Education (COPE) Residency In-Training Exam is a formative exam for Canadian psychiatric residents that was reconstructed using assessment best practices. An assessment of psychometric properties was subsequently performed on the exam to ensure preliminary validity and reliability. Methods: An exam…

The present article describes and evaluates the Youth Counseling Impact Scale (YCIS; L. Bickman et al., 2007), a recently developed therapeutic process measure that assesses youths' perceptions of the impact individual mental health counseling sessions have on their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. This measure is intended for frequent use in…

The measurement of dental fear is important due to its high prevalence and appreciable individual, clinical, and public health consequences. However, existing measures of dental anxiety and fear (DAF) have theoretical or practical limitations. This study describes the development and subsequent assessment of the reliability and validity of test…

In his comment on our literature review of data on the performance of sub-Saharan Africans on Raven's Progressive Matrices, Lynn (this issue) criticized our selection of samples of primary and secondary school students. On the basis of the samples he deemed representative, Lynn concluded that the average IQ of sub-Saharan Africans stands at 67…

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence (SSREI) scale in a sample of international students studying in the U.S. universities using Rasch analysis. The results indicated that the original five-category rating structure may not function effectively for the international student sample. The…

This paper compares different theoretical models of the structure of intelligence, based on the analysis of data obtained in a series of measured abilities corresponding to the Spectrum assessment activities (Gardner, Feldman & Krechevsky, 1998) in a sample of 393 children enrolled in kindergarten and first grade. The data were analyzed using…

Item factor analysis has a rich tradition in both the structural equation modeling and item response theory frameworks. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate a novel combination of various Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation routines to estimate parameters of a wide variety of confirmatory item factor analysis models. Further, I show…

Nested logit item response models for multiple-choice data are presented. Relative to previous models, the new models are suggested to provide a better approximation to multiple-choice items where the application of a solution strategy precedes consideration of response options. In practice, the models also accommodate collapsibility across all…

Research on assessment in medical education has strongly focused on individual measurement instruments and their psychometric quality. Without detracting from the value of this research, such an approach is not sufficient to high quality assessment of competence as a whole. A programmatic approach is advocated which presupposes criteria for…

Low scores across a battery of tests are common in healthy people and vary by demographic characteristics. The purpose of the present article was to present the base rates of low scores for the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, fourth edition (WISC-IV; D. Wechsler, 2003). Participants included 2,200 children and adolescents between 6 and…

The social accuracy model of interpersonal perception (SAM) is a componential model that estimates perceiver and target effects of different components of accuracy across traits simultaneously. For instance, Jane may be generally accurate in her perceptions of others and thus high in "perceptive accuracy"--the extent to which a particular…

There is general agreement in the field of school psychology that revised versions of tests should be adopted in a timely manner, and that to do otherwise is poor practice. This would seem to be in accord with the intent, if not the explicit wording, of ethical and professional guidelines. But does this mean that practitioners should always, and…

Background: Social desirability has been construed as either inaccurately attributing positive characteristics to oneself (self-deception), or inaccurately denying that one possesses undesirable characteristics to others (other-deception or impression management). These conceptualisations of social desirability have not been considered in relation…