Developing effective teaching practices within the higher education sector is an area of growing concern. Universities within the UK are judged on their competence in this area by mechanisms such as the National Student Survey and universities are anxious to be perceived as offering good quality teaching and learning experiences. The use of…

A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) tested the fit of Kelly and Lee's six-factor model of career decision problems among 188 college students. The six-factor model did not fit the data well, but a five-factor (Lack of Information, Need for Information, Trait Indecision, Disagreement with Others, and Choice Anxiety) model did provide a good fit.…

Background: The concepts of quality of life and family quality of life (FQOL) are increasingly being studied in the field of intellectual disabilities (ID) in China as important frameworks for: (1) assessing families' need for supports and services; (2) guiding organisational and service delivery system changes; and (3) evaluating quality family…

In this paper implicit function-based parameterizations for orthogonal and oblique rotation matrices are proposed. The parameterizations are used to construct Newton algorithms for minimizing differentiable rotation criteria applied to "m" factors and "p" variables. The speed of the new algorithms is compared to that of existing algorithms and to…

Aim: To gain more insight into the reasons and motives why people do not start taking ecstasy. Method: As part of the NeXT Study, we prospectively monitored 188 subjects who were ecstasy-naive at baseline but seemed likely to take ecstasy (MDMA) of their own accord during the course of the study. After an 11- to 26-month follow-up period, 160…

The study discussed the importance of test validity, often established when making decisions that may affect a student's future. The decisions made by policymakers and educators must not adversely affect any particular subgroups of students (i.e., year of administration, gender, ethnicity, level English proficiency, socioeconomic status, and…

According to empirical evidence and noted implications of sustainable agricultural development as a systemic and multi-actor process, integration of the research function of higher agricultural education in Iranian agricultural research systems seems to be an ongoing and considerable necessity. With the aim of identification and analysis of…

We apply the Supplemented EM algorithm (Meng & Rubin, 1991) to address a chronic problem with the "two-stage" fitting of covariance structure models in the presence of ignorable missing data: the lack of an asymptotically chi-square distributed goodness-of-fit statistic. We show that the Supplemented EM algorithm provides a…

Research suggests that student academic support plays a vital role at the college level as students often view communication with peers as their primary source of academic support (Thompson, 2008). This research advances the Student Academic Support Scale (SASS) as a method of assessing the frequency, importance, and mode of communicating academic…

Purpose: Motivating and enabling formal caregivers to provide individualized resident care has become an increasingly important objective in long-term care (LTC) facilities. The current study set out to examine the structure of responses to the individualized care inventory (ICI). Design and Methods: Samples of 242 registered nurses (RNs)/licensed…

The factor structure of the Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI) was assessed in a sample of 272 African American college students using confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses. The fit indices from the confirmatory analyses did not support the seven-factor first-order model or two alternative higher-order models suggested by…

Objective: To test Goodman's theoretical 5-factor model of the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) in an analysis of the Norwegian parent (P) and teacher (T) versions of the questionnaire. Method: The T-SDQ was analyzed for 8,999 (95.4% of all) children in primary school grades 2-4 in Bergen, Norway, whereas the P-SDQ was examined for…

Disconnection from the natural world may be contributing to our planet's destruction. The authors propose a new construct, Nature Relatedness (NR), and a scale that assesses the affective, cognitive, and experiential aspects of individuals' connection to nature. In Study 1, the authors explored the internal structure of the NR item responses in a…

Ryff's ("1989b") Psychological Well-Being (PWB) scales measure six related constructs of human functioning. The present paper examined the validity of Ryff's 6-factor PWB model, using data from a life events study (N = 401) and an organisational climate study (N = 679). Previous validation studies, using Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), have…

How do students' conceptualize the causes of their own academic successes and failures? Taking a phenomenological approach, students identified the causes of their performance immediately following return of a graded examination. We then used factor and item analyses to organize causes that were identified by a substantial number of students into…