In 2002, President George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act. In addition to providing additional funding for schools and encouraging local autonomy, the new law focuses on accountability in an attempt to close the achievement gap for all students, leaving no child behind. Perhaps the most striking manifestation of Bush's new law is the…

Objective: The aim was to construct and test the reliability (utility, internal consistency, interrater agreement) and the validity (internal validity, concurrent validity) of a scale for home visiting social nurses to identify risks of physical abuse and neglect in mothers with a newborn child. Method: A 71-item scale was constructed based on a…

The Moral and Social Action Interdisciplinary Colloquium (MOSAIC) is an international multidisciplinary network of scholars working within the fields of the philosophy, psychology and sociology of moral development, moral education and moral thought. MOSAIC runs an annual conference, traditionally in June or July. This conference attracts an…

This study investigated the chemistry laboratory classroom environment, teacher-student interactions and student attitudes towards chemistry among 497 gifted and non-gifted secondary-school students in Singapore. The data were collected using the 35-item Chemistry Laboratory Environment Inventory (CLEI), the 48-item Questionnaire on Teacher…

This study examined the relevance of the Goal Instability Scale-Portuguese Adaptation (GIS-P) on the vocational identity and career certainty of 375 10th-, 11th-, and 12th-grade Portuguese high schoolers. After translating the GIS-P, confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the factorial unidimensionality and reliability of the construct.…

Objective: To describe the development and validation of the Secondary Traumatic Stress Scale (STSS), a 17-item instrument designed to measure intrusion, avoidance, and arousal symptoms associated with indirect exposure to traumatic events via one's professional relationships with traumatized clients. Method: A sample of 287 licensed social…

Objective/Method: The use of brief, reliable, valid, and practical measures of substance use is critical for conducting individual assessments and program evaluation for integrated mental health-substance abuse services for persons with serious mental illness. This investigation examines the internal consistency reliability, concurrent validity,…

The present study provides information on the reliability and validity of the Transracial Adoption Parenting Scale (TAPS), a multidimensional 36-item Likert-type scale that measures cultural competence among transracial adoptive (TRA) parents. The TAPS was theoretically developed and refined through feedback from experts in TRA adoption. A…

The aim of this study was to develop a means of tracking the reading performance of low-progress readers on a weekly basis, so as to inform instructional decision-making. A representative sample of 261 primary school children from Years 1 to 5 were tested on 21 different text passages taken from a developing passage reading test, the Wheldall…

In this article, the authors report the psychometric properties of a parent-completed rating scale based on the criteria for oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) in the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Fourth Edition-Text Revision" ("DSM-IV-TR"). Mothers of 294 boys and 48 girls with…

This study examined teachers' behavioral ratings of young children (ages 5 and 6) with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A study group consisting of 30 children with formal diagnoses of ADHD and a comparison group of 30 children without ADHD were developed using randomized matching procedures. Teachers of these children…

Objective: To evaluate the psychometric properties of a new measure, the Abuse-Related Beliefs Questionnaire (ARBQ), designed to assess abuse-related beliefs among adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Study 1 examined the structure of the scale, and Study 2 evaluated its reliability and validity. Method: One hundred and seventy female…

Since the last "TESOL Quarterly" commemorative issue 15 years ago, there have been too many important developments in language testing and assessment for all of them to be discussed in a single article. Therefore, this article focuses on issues that we believe are integrally linked to pedagogic and curriculum concerns of English language teaching.…

Purpose: To scale language milestones in a group of 527 children to provide an instrument for screening language development. Procedure: The questionnaire regarding these milestones was completed by parental report. It was evaluated whether the scaled milestones satisfied the assumptions of the Mokken item response model. Results: The scalability…

The psychometric properties of the Pervasive Developmental Disorders Rating scale (Eaves, 2003) and the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale (Gilliam, 1995) were investigated in this study. One hundred thirty-four individuals with autism, other pervasive developmental disorders, or conditions frequently confused with autism participated in the study. The…