Determines teacher and child behaviors during story reading and how they are related. Gathers data from 146 urban and suburban elementary school classrooms. Uses factor analysis to identify five categories of teacher behaviors and five categories of student behaviors. Finds that, across grade levels, children's involvement in prediscussion was…

Examines effects of 5 test-format differences on performance of 15 critical-thinking measures. Scores of 172 Canadian high school students on all measures generated a correlation matrix that was best accounted for by a 5-factor model postulating critical-thinking, context, and credibility judgment factors. Multiple-choice and constructed-response…

Investigates perceptions of over 700 college faculty members about the formation and execution of academic policies covering student athletes. Faculty are indifferent to athletes in general, and they believe they do not have an influence on academic policies for athletes regardless of institutional policies. (SLD)

Two studies assessed the construct validity of Greenspan's models of adaptive and social intelligence with 75 adolescents with mental retardation. Factor analysis measures of conceptual intelligence, adaptive behavior, and social intelligence yielded a practice-interpersonal competence construct. The second study, however, failed to establish the…

Examined peer self-concept and its associations with structural and qualitative features of peer experiences in high school students. Factor analysis supported a three-factor model that differentiated the peer self-concept in terms of the peer group, close friendships, and romantic relationships. Found that both peer network structure and…

Principal components analysis of standardization sample data for the Comprehensive Test of Adaptive Behavior, involving 6,647 persons with mental retardation, found that a single factor accounted for 86 percent of the variance in category scores. Use of the Total Score and idiographic item clusters is psychometrically preferable to use of category…

Three heuristic methods of assessing the dimensionality of binary item pools were evaluated in a Monte Carlo investigation. The indices were based on (1) the local independence of unidimensional tests; (2) patterns of second-factor loadings derived from simplex theory; and (3) the shape of the curve of successive eigenvalues. (SLD)

Because they used an inappropriate statistical procedure, J. H. Kranzler and A. R. Jensen (1991) have not demonstrated that a factor of general intelligence ("g") depends on several independent factors. A factorial reanalysis of their data suggests that speed and efficiency of information processing are important in "g." (SLD)

The hypothetical idea of a perfectly pure psychometric "g" is empirically unattainable. Because the unity of "g" cannot be proved or disproved by factor analysis, the unitary "g" hypothesis represents a parsimonious assumption. J. B. Carroll's (1991) analysis demonstrates the relationship between psychometric and…

A Monte Carlo study was conducted to assess the robustness of the limited information two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation procedure on a confirmatory factor analysis model with nonnormal distributions. Full information maximum likelihood methods were used for comparison. One hundred model replications were used to generate data. (TJH)

In a simulation study, factor analysis and multidimensional item response theory (IRT) models are compared with respect to estimates of item parameters. For multidimensional data, a common factor analysis on the matrix of tetrachoric correlations performs at least as well as the multidimensional IRT model. (SLD)

Factor analysis of 23 scales assessing language and other forms of anxiety identified three separate factors of social evaluation, state, and language anxiety and found some correlations between scores based on those factors and measures of memory and vocabulary production in both native and second language. (46 references) (Author/CB)

A factorial survey incorporating 2,308 vignettes (1,198 vignettes by females and 1,110 by males) about student-to-student sexual harassment was completed by 231 undergraduates. Perceived seriousness of the incident depended most on behavior of the male offender. Implications for the study of sexual harassment and accounts of harassment are…

Observes the impact of gender and status on the communication of 26 same-sex and 13 mixed-sex dyads of college students. Suggests that differences in the use of certain linguistic features may be more a result of a power differential than of gender. Other characteristics of the speaker, however, must also be considered. (CJS)

Describes a new method for automatic indexing and retrieval called latent semantic indexing (LSI). Problems with matching query words with document words in term-based information retrieval systems are discussed, semantic structure is examined, singular value decomposition (SVD) is explained, and the mathematics underlying the SVD model is…