In 2007-08 and 2008-09, 2,500 randomly-selected middle school students completed an annual survey on school climate and character development. In examining differences based upon grade, gender, race/ethnicity, school, and length of program participation, significant differences were found for all but length of program participation. Responses of…

We are grateful to the commentators for providing many stimulating and valuable observations. The main point of our article was to call attention to the overestimation of individual differences correlations in a subset of neuroimaging papers. To structure our discussion of these comments, we list the main points from our paper, note where…

The aim of this study was to gain an enhanced understanding of middle-grade teachers' beliefs about adolescents and teaching mathematics. The participants were three veteran middle-grade teachers in different school districts who were purposively selected by the researcher. Data collection methods included semi-structured interviews, observations…

South African institutions of higher education seek to innovate their practices to more inclusively, effectively, and justly serve the needs of a diverse student population. Career counselling shares in this aim in an age of ever-widening globalization and burgeoning information technology. Counsellors around the globe must increasingly move to…

Background: Both ability (measured by power tests) and non-ability (measured by preference tests) individual difference measures predict academic school outcomes. These include fluid as well as crystalized intelligence, personality traits, and learning styles. This paper examines the incremental validity of five psychometric tests and the sex and…

The aim of this study was to find the most prominent source of intersubject variability in neuronal activation for reading familiar words aloud. To this end, we collected functional imaging data from a large sample of subjects (n = 76) with different demographic characteristics such as handedness, sex, and age, while reading. The…

Robert E. Ployhart, recipient of the Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology, is cited for innovative work in examining reactions to staffing practices and efforts to enhance the acceptability of recruitment and staffing practices; for exemplary use of applied statistical models in examining multilevel effects…

Conscientiousness is often found to predict academic outcomes, but is defined differently by different models of personality. High school students (N = 291) completed a large number of Conscientiousness items from different models and the Big Five Inventory (BFI). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of the items uncovered eight facets:…

Can one glimpse the development of emerging scholars in the work of engineering graduate students? To answer this question, the author studied the citation patterns in 96 Master's theses and 24 Ph.D. dissertations completed at Western Michigan University's College of Engineering and Applied Sciences between 2002 and 2006. The hypothesis of this…

Children who were 4 to 8 years of age were asked to perform a sort-recall task where only half of the items had to be studied and remembered. Following a baseline trial, children were assigned to 1 of 3 groups and were prompted to use either a sorting or a clustering strategy (experimental groups) or were not prompted at all (control group).…

A multidimensional item response theory model that accounts for response style factors is presented. The model, a multidimensional extension of Bock's nominal response model, is shown to allow for the study and control of response style effects in ordered rating scale data so as to reduce bias in measurement of the intended trait. In the current…

This study examined the development of joint attention in 95 infants assessed between 9 and 18 months of age. Infants displayed significant test-retest reliability on measures of following gaze and gestures (responding to joint attention, RJA) and in their use of eye contact to establish social attention coordination (initiating joint attention,…

A time-course analysis of visual attention focusing (attentional constraint) was conducted in groups of participants with high and low working memory spans, a dimension the authors have argued reflects the ability to control attention. In 4 experiments, participants performed the Eriksen flanker paradigm under increasing levels of speed stress.…

Ideally, the unit of analysis in psychology is the individual. However, many psychological methods do not cope well, either at the level of construct definition or at the level of measurement, with individuality in behavior. There is little leeway for constructs to be both idiosyncratically tailored to the individual, and still identified as…

Heterogeneity of variance may be more than a statistical nuisance--it may be of direct interest as a result of individual differences. In studies of short-term fluctuation, individual differences may relate to the magnitude of within-person variation as well as to level of an outcome or its covariation with other processes. Although models for…