Personal statements are a widely used and popular predictor in academic admissions; however, relatively little is known about their effectiveness as a predictor of student performance. This study involved a meta-analysis of the relationships of personal statements to measures of student performance (e.g., GPA) and other predictors. An initial…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of a child self efficacy scale for learning, peer interactions, and resisting pressure to use drugs, to use in an elementary school drug prevention education program based on social cognitive theory. A diverse cohort of 392 4th and 5th grade students completed the 20-item…

The success of early intervention programs has in large part spurred increasing emphasis on identifying children with autism and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) at the earliest possible ages. National and international professional groups have called for early screening and diagnosis, yet the technology to…

The internal consistency and validity of the interRAI Community Health Assessment and Deafblind Supplement were tested with 182 persons with deaf-blindness. All subscales demonstrated good to excellent internal consistency, and expected associations provided evidence of convergent validity. This instrument can facilitate standardized service…

The purpose of the present study was to document the development and standardization of the "Preschool Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale" and to examine its factor structure, internal consistency, and criterion validity. Data from a nationally representative sample (N = 1,471) of preschool children with and without disabilities were…

A case study of the psychometric characteristics of two profoundly gifted girls, one with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and the other without ASD, is used to describe the nuances and subtleties most relevant in understanding the relationship between extreme giftedness and social difficulties. Through the presentation of the results from…

The aim of this paper was to validate the Brazilian-Portuguese version of the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), presenting evidence of its reliability and construct and criterion-related validity. A large Brazilian sample (2,180 participants), from five different populations (undergraduate and high school students, general population,…

Children's vocabulary development represents a critical foundation for their reading skills. This article describes a curriculum-based vocabulary progress monitoring tool that was used to track the development of Head Start children--and particularly those at highest risk for later reading difficulty--as they learned new words during the school…

The series of articles presented in this journal issue reports a systematic approach to judging the validity of a test within a framework recommended by Kane (2001, 2004a). The authors' approach effectively integrates quantitative and qualitative tools, showing the role of psychometric models in validation, and emphasizes the importance of clearly…

Using Lumsden's Thurstonian fluctuation model as a starting point, this paper attempts to develop a unidimensional item response theory model intended for binary personality items. Under some additional assumptions, a new model is obtained in which the item characteristic curves are defined by a cumulative Pearson-Type-VII distribution, and the…

Log-multiplicative association (LMA) models, which are special cases of log-linear models, have interpretations in terms of latent continuous variables. Two theoretical derivations of LMA models based on item response theory (IRT) arguments are presented. First, we show that Anderson and colleagues (Anderson & Vermunt, 2000; Anderson & Bockenholt,…

One of the most revolutionary advances in psychometric research during the last decades has been the systematic development of statistical models that allow for cognitive psychometric research (CPR) to be conducted. Many of the models currently available for such purposes are extensions of basic latent variable models in item response theory…

The current study used item response theory to provide a detailed examination of the psychometric properties of scores from two goal orientation instruments popular in the work motivation literature: Button, Mathieu, and Zajac (1996) and VandeWalle (1997). In general, the results of these analyses indicated that all scales except Button et al.'s…

The Candecomp/Parafac (CP) method decomposes a three-way array into a prespecified number R of rank-1 arrays, by minimizing the sum of squares of the residual array. The practical use of CP is sometimes complicated by the occurrence of so-called degenerate sequences of solutions, in which several rank-1 arrays become highly correlated in all three…

In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on the mental health and social and behavioral developmental needs of very young children. In response, state administrators and local providers of early intervention and preschool programs have worked to strengthen their screening and assessment of children's social and emotional development. The…