The reauthorized Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) established new provisions for specific learning disability (SLD) identification, including: (a) no longer requiring consideration of IQ-achievement discrepancy and (b) permitting response to intervention (RTI) as part of SLD evaluation procedures. We discuss several…

Researchers in a number of disciplines have examined the utility of single-item measures for both affective and cognitive constructs. While these authors have indicated that, under certain circumstances, the use of single-item measures is appropriate, there remains concern regarding the reliability and validity of single-item measures. This study…

Various taxonomies of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM) items have been proposed in the literature to account for performance on the test. In the present article, three such taxonomies based on information processing, namely Carpenter, Just and Shell's [Carpenter, P.A., Just, M.A., & Shell, P., (1990). What one intelligence test…

Background: The Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) is designed to measure psychological adjustment in children and adolescents. Psychometric evaluations of the instrument have shown satisfactory convergent and discriminant validity, while factor analysis studies have shown mixed results across countries. In the present study, the…

Understanding the reasons for self-harm (SH) may be paramount for the identification and treatment of SH behavior. Presently, the psychometric properties for SH reason questionnaires are generally unknown or tested only in non-inpatient samples. Existing inpatient measures may have limited generalizability and do not examine SH apart from an…

This study investigates the relationships of domain-general cognitive abilities and domain-specific verbal and mathematical abilities to students' educational characteristics when two theoretically grounded, but competing structural models are applied. In the standard model, a single latent ability causes interindividual differences in the…

The Treatment Motivation Scales for forensic outpatient treatment (TMS-F) is a Dutch 85-item self-report questionnaire for the motivation of forensic outpatients to engage in their treatment and six cognitive and affective determinants of this motivation. Following descriptions of the conceptual basis and construction, the psychometric properties…

U.S. state educational testing programs administer tests to track student progress and hold schools accountable for educational outcomes. Methods from item response theory, especially Rasch models, are usually used to equate different forms of a test. The most popular method for estimating Rasch models yields inconsistent estimates and relies on…

Elementary school children's word guessing is studied, and the results from individual and collective testing conditions are compared. The participants are 764 students from the second, third, and fourth grades (ages 8-11, 541 students from mainstream regular classes and 223 students with learning disabilities). About half of these students are…

Griffiths, Christian, and Kalish (this issue) present an iterative-learning paradigm applying a Bayesian model to understand inductive biases in categorization. The authors argue that the paradigm is useful as an exploratory tool to understand inductive biases in situations where little is known about the task. It is argued that a theory developed…

The factor structure of several self-report questionnaires assessing depression-relevant cognitions frequently employed in clinical research was examined in a sample of 390 adolescents (M age = 14.54; 216 girls; 74% Caucasian) with current major depressive disorder enrolled in the Treatment of Adolescents with Depression Study. A four-factor…

A short form of the Drinking Motive Questionnaire Revised (DMQ-R; Cooper, 1994) was developed, using different item selection strategies based on a national representative sample of 5,617 12- to 18-year-old students in Switzerland. To confirm the concurrent validity of the short-form questionnaire, or DMQ-R SF, data from a second national sample…

The psychometric properties and factor structure of the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale were examined in a sample of 422 male and female adolescents (ages 12-17) with current major depressive disorder. The scale demonstrated high internal consistency ([alpha] = 0.93) and correlated significantly with self-report and interview-based measures of…

The objective of this study was development and psychometric testing of an adaptive, International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF)-oriented questionnaire to be processed by the rehabilitation physician that aids in assessing mobility, self-care, and domestic life (Moses-Physician). The intent is to develop a physician…

The Social and Character Development (SACD) research program was designed to evaluate the effectiveness of seven elementary-school-based programs developed to promote social and emotional competence, positive behavior, a positive school climate, and academic achievement, and to decrease negative behavior. Procedures undertaken by the SACD…