Technology and engineering education students responded to a survey regarding hands-on and hands-off activities. First, the students listed hands-on and hands-off activities and what characterized the two types of activities. Activities such as building or assembling something as well as working manually with tools were viewed as hands-on. Passive…

Over the past decade, there has been an increased need for the development and use of psychometrically acceptable measures to assess the behavioral and emotional strengths of young children served in statewide preschool and Head Start programs. One measure developed to address this need is the Preschool Behavioral and Emotional Rating Scale…

In this multi-stage mixed analysis study, the views of 615 college students enrolled at two Hispanic-serving institutions in the Southwest were obtained concerning characteristics of effective school principals. Through the method of constant comparison (qualitative phase), 29 dominant themes were determined to be present in respondent-identified…

This study investigated the effectiveness, in terms of the attainment of relevant learning outcomes, of the types of learning promoted by educational features commonly incorporated in course management systems. Twenty-one courses with significant use of the Internet, but with face-to-face teaching as the predominant instructional mode, were…

The study was designed to estimate the psychometric properties of Hastings and Brown's (2002a) Difficult Behavior Self-efficacy Scale. Participants were two samples of physical educators teaching in Korea (n = 229) and the United States (U.S.; n = 139). An initial translation of the questionnaire to Korean and pilot study were conducted along with…

Given that sexually offensive behavior on the part of people with intellectual disabilities has been identified as a significant problem, we developed a risk assessment questionnaire, that takes not only various static and dynamic factors into account but also environmental risk variables. Psychologists and staff members completed this Risk…

This paper discusses the advantages and problems related to factor analysis by minimizing residuals (minres). It is shown that this method fails if the starting point of iterations is not well chosen. A suitable starting point is suggested. (Author)

Demonstrates that the weighting procedure proposed by E. Cureton and S. Mulaik (1975) can be applied to the Direct Oblimin approach of D. Clarkson and R. Jennrich (1988) to provide good results. The rotation method obtained is called Weighted Oblimin. Compared this method to other rotation methods with favorable results. (SLD)

Discusses the use of analytic rotation in exploratory factor analysis, giving particular attention to situations in which there is a complex factor pattern. Standard results are believed to yield poor solutions. Discusses some little known but interesting rotation criteria and examines methods for weighting variables. Illustrates the procedures.…

Building on previous studies centred on the interaction between adviser and advisee in masters thesis projects, in which a qualitative approach was used, the present study uses factor analysis to identify the factors that determine either a successful or unsuccessful outcome for the masters thesis project. There were five factors relating to the…

Component loss functions (CLFs) similar to those used in orthogonal rotation are introduced to define criteria for oblique rotation in factor analysis. It is shown how the shape of the CLF affects the performance of the criterion it defines. For example, it is shown that monotone concave CLFs give criteria that are minimized by loadings with…

Parallel analysis has been well documented to be an effective and accurate method for determining the number of factors to retain in exploratory factor analysis. Despite its theoretical and empirical advantages, the popularity of parallel analysis has been thwarted by its limited access in statistical software such as SPSS and SAS, especially in…

Nomothetic and idiographic approaches to research have long been in tension. John Nesselroade et al. have been at the forefront of a constructive rapprochement between these traditions. Heretofore their efforts have assumed a common measurement structure across persons. They have primarily focused on modeling relationships within persons, which…

Marriage and family therapists (MFTs), who are trained in systems theory and consult with complex and difficult systems (e.g., couples and families), are uniquely suited to both assess and intervene in broader organizational systems. However, MFTs are in need of more systemically designed assessment tools to guide and inform their interventions…

Borsboom (Psychometrika, 71:425-440, 2006) noted that recent work on measurement invariance (MI) and predictive invariance (PI) has had little impact on the practice of measurement in psychology. To understand this contention, the definitions of MI and PI are reviewed, followed by results on the consistency between the two forms of invariance in…