This article draws on work done in educational psychology to propose a new approach to generating a psychometrically-based measure of second language learners' strategic learning, operationalized as their "self-regulatory capacity," as an alternative to the scales traditionally used to quantify language learning strategy use. The self-regulation…

In two studies, Study 1 and Study 2, we examine whether attitudes toward people with intellectual disabilities, like sexism and racism, consist of two forms--a classical and a modern, where the classical is overt and blatant and the modern is more subtle and covert. Self-report scales tapping these two forms were developed in Study 1. Based on…

Objectives: To evaluate whether or not the original six-factor structure of the Child Abuse Potential (CAP) Inventory suggested by [Milner, J. S. (1986). "The Child Abuse Potential Inventory: Manual" (2nd ed.). DeKalb, IL: Psytec. Inc.] can be confirmed with data from a group of Chinese mothers in Hong Kong. Method: Eight hundred and…

Campaigns to prevent adolescent smoking increasingly depict the tobacco industry as deceitful and exploitative. This study was undertaken to determine how adolescents' expectations about the trustworthiness of companies, in general, influence the pathway through which anti-tobacco industry campaigns prevent smoking. Structural equation modeling…

Background: The right shift (RS) theory of handedness suggests that poor phonology may occur in the general population as a risk associated with absence of an agent of left cerebral speech, the hypothesised RS + gene. The theory predicts that poor phonology is associated with reduced bias to right-handedness. Methods: A representative cohort of…

In this study, the authors tried various methods to measure and conceptualize curiosity. A sample of 369 education students (103 men, 266 women) who were attending universities on the East Coast of the United States completed 5 paper-and-pencil curiosity measures in 1 of their classes. Using confirmatory factor analysis, the authors found that the…

This study examines the underlying structure of the Clinical Experience Rubric (CER), which is designed to assess preservice teachers' dispositions during the clinical experiences. Dispositions were conceptualized as being a multidimensional construct with three related factors: (a) professionalism, (b) teaching quality, and (c) relationship with…

A simulation study was conducted to examine the effect of item parceling on confirmatory factor analysis parameter estimates and their standard errors at different levels of sample size, number of indicators per factor, size of factor structure/pattern coefficients, magnitude of interfactor correlations, and variations in item-level data…

Injury prevention at home is an important concern for parents of toddlers. This study investigated safety-related intervention strategies of 40 middle-class Australian mothers, and their relationship with three child characteristics: gender, temperament and language comprehension. In an interview at home, mothers reported frequency of use of 15…

The construct validity of English and Spanish phonological awareness (PA) tasks was examined with a sample of 812 kindergarten children from 71 transitional bilingual education program classrooms located in 3 different types of geographic regions in California and Texas. Tasks of PA, including blending nonwords, segmenting words, and phoneme…

This study examined the relationships of vocational interests and self-efficacy expectations, or confidence, to personality, as measured by the Personal Styles scales of the Strong Interest Inventory. The study also examined the extent to which confidence and personality measures contributed incrementally to the prediction of occupational group…

Purpose: This study aims to examine students' perceptions and their acceptance towards implementing a laptop program. Design/methodology/approach: Extensive research has been carried out on the technology acceptance model (TAM) to better understand the behavioral intention of individuals to accept and use technology. Therefore, the TAM was adopted…

This study explores the reliability and validity of the Career Decision Self-Efficacy Scale-Short Form (CDSES-SF) in Chinese high school students. One hundred and eighty-three high school students from a city in northeastern China participated in the study. The results indicate that scores on the CDSES-SF are reliable (internal consistency…

Despite on-going calls for developing cultural competency among mental health practitioners, few assessment instruments consider cultural variation in psychological constructs. To meet the challenge of developing measures for minority and international students, it is necessary to account for the influence culture may have on the latent constructs…

Original formulations of the Work Locus of Control Scale (WLCS) proposed a unidimensional structure of this measure; however, more recently, evidence for a two-dimensional structure has been reported, with separate subscales for internal and external loci of control. The current study evaluates the one- and two-factor models with confirmatory…