Presented at the national conference for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in April 2009. This study examined the utility of scores on the SAT writing test, specifically examining the reliability of scores using generalizability and item response theories. The study also provides an overview of current predictive validity…

Extending the knowledge derived from investigations with teachers, this study explores of the interrelationship of school psychologists' professional efficacy and perceived school climate for promoting family collaboration and salient aspects of their training and practice. The Perceptions of Capacity for Family Collaboration (PCFC) rating scale…

Consultation researchers have long recognized the importance of assessing fidelity of intervention implementation, including the fidelity with which both consultation procedures and behavioral intervention plans are delivered. However, despite decades of discussion about the importance of assessing for fidelity of implementation in intervention…

The authors argue for a significant shift in how clinical psychology researchers conduct construct validation and theory validation tests. They argue that sound theory and validation tests can best be conducted on measures of unidimensional or homogeneous constructs. Hierarchical organizations of such constructs are useful descriptively and…

The Devereux Early Childhood Assessment (DECA) was developed to assess the social-emotional functioning of preschool children. The developers of the DECA report initial validity and reliability evidence in support of the use of the instrument with 2- to 5-year-old children across the United States. There is further need to collect independent…

We investigated the psychometric validity and reliability of the Suicide Status Form-II (SSF-II) developed by Jobes, Jacoby, Cimbolic, and Hustead (1997). Participants were 149 psychiatric inpatients (108 suicidal; 41 nonsuicidal) at the Mayo Clinic. Each participant completed assessment measures within 24 hours of admission and 48-72 hours later.…

The authors propose a simple behavioral economic model (BEM) describing how reinforcement and interval timing interact. The model assumes a Weber-law-compliant logarithmic representation of time. Associated with each represented time value are the payoffs that have been obtained for each possible response. At a given real time, the response with…

The present study assessed the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, Second Edition (KABC-II) in relation to the synthesized Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of intelligence with a preschool sample. Participants were 200 preschool children between four and five years of age. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was conducted, and different…

Challenging behaviors are common and persistent in persons with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Best practices dictate that symptoms of ASD and these co-occurring problems be identified and then treated at the earliest possible age. Having said this, there has been a dearth of available assessment methods to make sure identifications in infants…

The attachment patterns of younger and older adults were studied using two-dimensional self-report measures of adult attachment. Community-dwelling younger (n = 144, M = 22.5 years, SD = 3.6) and older (n = 106, M = 68.6 years, SD = 8.3) adults completed the Measure of Attachment Qualities (MAQ; Carver, 1997) and the Relationship Style…

Two studies were conducted to examine validity evidence for the College Self-Efficacy Inventory, by investigating dimensionality and theoretically based relationships with external criteria. Modifications to the scale yielded an adequately fitting three-factor model, and most hypothesized relationships were empirically supported. However,…

This study evaluates the psychometric properties of a measure of mattering to other people. A confirmatory factor analysis supported a four-factor model. In addition, mattering was positively related to measures of well-being and negatively related to measures of worry. The four factors related differently to these variables, providing additional…

Based on data from a sample of 106 students in grades 2 through 8, we explored the psychometric integrity of the Universal Academic, Cognitive, Creativity, Emotion Screening Scale (Universal ACCESS; R. S. McCallum & B. A. Bracken, in press). We obtained Cronbach's alphas ranging from 0.95 to 0.98 across the eight scales of the Universal…

The importance of emotional aspects in developing cognitive and social abilities has already been underlined by many authors even if there is no unanimous agreement on the factors constituting adaptive abilities, nor is there any on the way to measure them or on the relation between adaptive ability and cognitive level. The purposes of this study…

The present study was aimed at developing an attitude scale and then use it to reveal the attitude of mathematical gifted students' attitude towards mathematics. In the first phase of the study, an attitude-scale (AS) towards mathematics were designed using the psychometric approach. The AS was composed of seventeen items aimed to measure four…