The authors sought to determine whether teacher and collective efficacy beliefs predict commitment to the teaching profession. The participants were 26,257 teachers and 6,711 principals who responded to the public school teacher and principal questionnaires of the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey (U.S. Department of Education, 2005). The…

Longitudinal analyses on normal versus impaired functioning across 7 domains were conducted in children who had experienced profound institutional deprivation up to the age of 42 months and were adopted from Romania into U.K. families. Comparisons were made with noninstitutionalized children adopted from Romania and with nondeprived within-U.K.…

Pragmatic proficiency has been incorporated in the EFL teaching and testing syllabi in China, but the corresponding tests still focus on linguistic competence. The gap between the teaching and testing is mainly due to the lack of generally accepted measures of communicative abilities such as pragmatic competence. This study developed a…

In tertiary institutions in Australia, and no doubt elsewhere, there is increasing pressure for accountability. No longer are academics assumed "a priori" to be responsible and capable of self management in teaching and assessing the subjects they run. Procedures are being dictated more from the "top down". Although academics…

The Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) is widely used to screen university applicants for whom English is not their native language. Although the cutoff scores vary, in Ontario those with scores much lower than 550 are rarely admitted to any university. Two exceptions are the University of Western Ontario and its affiliate, Brescia…

This article aims to contribute to the ongoing evaluation of the Australian Early Development Index (AEDI) by investigating its construct and concurrent validity with a subsample of 642 children aged 4 to 5 years drawn from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC). Construct validity was examined by considering the theoretical…

The authors describe a new self-report instrument, the Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms (IDAS), which was designed to assess specific symptom dimensions of major depression and related anxiety disorders. They created the IDAS by conducting principal factor analyses in 3 large samples (college students, psychiatric patients, community…

This article documents the development, factor structure, and psychometric properties of the parent- and youth-report forms of the Child Obsessive Compulsive Impact Scale-Revised (COIS-R), a measure of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)-specific functional impairment. Using a sample of 250 youth (M age = 11.7, 54% male, 80% Caucasian) diagnosed…

College drinking behavior is a national public health concern. However, little research has been conducted to test the psychometric validity and reliability of alcohol use measures among Spanish-speaking Hispanic college students. Adopting a translation-back-translation approach, the Rutgers Alcohol Problem Index (RAPI) was translated into Spanish…

A 24-item short form of the 96-item Developmental Behaviour Checklist was developed to provide a brief measure of Total Behaviour Problem Score for research purposes. The short form Developmental Behaviour Checklist (DBC-P24) was chosen for low bias and high precision from among 100 randomly selected item sets. The DBC-P24 was developed from…

A study investigated possible causes of high percentages of students failing the Ohio Ninth Grade Proficiency Test (ONGPT) in mathematics. The validity of the math test may be questionable. The reading and math scores of over 200 ninth-grade students from a rural school in northwest Ohio were used as a basis. Only scores from the fall of 1991,…

Among the more recent personality assessment tools used by counseling psychologists is Millon's Clinical Multiaxial Inventory (MCMI). This instrument was created, in part, to reflect the changes that had occurred in psychologists' understanding of personality, psychopathology, and diagnostic assessment. The MCMI is derived from Millon's biosocial…

A scale was developed to assess several types of motivation in elementary school children. In addition to the usually recognized internal and external motivation, a third type, termed "amotivation," has been postulated. Students are amotivated when they do not perceive a link between outcomes and their own actions. The preliminary…

The first study described in this paper estimates the reliability of the four subscale versions of the 40-item Computer Attitude Scale (CAS), an instrument designed to measure attitudes toward learning about and using computers. It provides detailed information about the factor patterns of CAS subscales and evidence of the differential validity of…

The present research developed and validated a self-reported instrument called the "Relaxing Others Scale" (ROS), which is designed to identify individuals who possess the ability to relax others. A second part of the study involved assessing the construct validity of the ROS. Participants in the study were male and female dormitory…