The importance of technology for education is increasing year-by-year at all educational levels and particularly for Universities. This paper reexamines one important determinant of technology acceptance and use, such as perceived playfulness in the context of a blended learning setting and reveals existing gender differences. After a literature…

Involvement in health-endangering behaviors is considered a reflection of college students' psychosocial development; however, not all students participate in these activities. Emotion skills, such as the ability to interpret and manage emotions, may serve as a protective factor against risk-taking behavior among emerging adults. We compared the…

Procrastination is an educational concern for classroom instructors because of its negative psychological and academic impacts on students. However, the traditional view of procrastination as a unidimensional construct is insufficient in two regards. First, the construct needs to be viewed more broadly as time-related academic behavior,…

The purpose of this 3-wave study is to examine the micro process of how employees adapt to change over time. We combined Conservation of Resources theory with insights from the organizational change literature to study employees in a Dutch police district undergoing reorganization. A model was tested where employee adaptability, operationalized by…

Emerging evidence suggests that some individuals may be simultaneously more responsive to the effects from environmental adversity "and" enrichment (i.e., differential susceptibility). Given that parenting behavior and a variable number tandem repeat polymorphism in the 3'untranslated region of the dopamine transporter (DAT1) gene are…

We present a test for cluster bias, which can be used to detect violations of measurement invariance across clusters in 2-level data. We show how measurement invariance assumptions across clusters imply measurement invariance across levels in a 2-level factor model. Cluster bias is investigated by testing whether the within-level factor loadings…

Most organizations spend millions of dollars due to the impact of improperly implemented database application systems as evidenced by poor data quality problems. The purpose of this quantitative study was to use, and extend, the technology acceptance model (TAM) to assess the impact of information quality and technical quality factors on database…

Evaluating the psychometric properties of a newly developed instrument is critical to understanding how well an instrument measures what it intends to measure, and ensuring proposed use and interpretation of questionnaire scores are valid. The current study uses Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) techniques to examine the factorial structure and…

We propose the use of the latent change and latent acceleration frameworks for modeling nonlinear growth in structural equation models. Moving to these frameworks allows for the direct identification of "rates of change" and "acceleration" in latent growth curves--information available indirectly through traditional growth…

We examine the relationship between different dimensions of the political regime in place and human capital using a two-step structural equation model. In the first step, we employ factor analysis on 16 human capital indicators to construct two new human capital measures (basic and advanced human capital). In the second step, we estimate the…

Early academic achievement has been shown to predict high school completion, but there have been few studies of the predictors of early academic success focused on Latino students. Using longitudinal data from 750 Mexican and Dominican American families, this study examined a cultural model of parenting and early academic achievement. While Latino…

We report on an effectiveness evaluation of the Youth Empowerment Solutions (YES) program. YES applies empowerment theory to an after-school program for middle school students. YES is an active learning curriculum designed to help youth gain confidence in themselves, think critically about their community, and work with adults to create positive…

A fairly recent definition of reading disability (RD) is that in the form of a hybrid model. The model views RD as a latent construct that is manifested through various observable unexpected impairments in reading-related skills and through inadequate response to intervention. The current report evaluated this new conceptualization of RD from an…

This study investigates the impact of students' motivation and personality traits on their academic performance in online and blended learning environments. It was conducted with students attending a mandatory introductory information technology course given in a university in Turkey. The Big Five Inventory and Motivated Strategies for Learning…

The therapeutic working alliance by Bordin has been demonstrated as a 'common ground' variable attributable to change in identified change enterprises, including education. In this context, working alliance (renamed learning alliance) has been empirically demonstrated to predict positive on-campus student outcomes. However, minimal research…