This article presents the author's observations on Neil Dorans's NCME Career Award Address: "The Contestant Perspective on Taking Tests: Emanations from the Statue within." He calls attention to some points that Dr. Dorans made in his address, and offers his thoughts in response.

The repetitive behaviour questionnaire (RBQ) (Turner, 1995) is one of the three most commonly used interview/questionnaire measures of repetitive behaviour (Honey et al., in preparation). Despite this there is a scarcity of information concerning its structure, reliability and validity. The psychometric properties of the RBQ were examined when…

A Chinese version of the revised NEP Scale was generated and adopted in a survey among 507 students (age 10 to 12 years old) from three elementary schools in Shenzhen, China. The results show an acceptable level of internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.65) but some abnormalities on the modified NEP scale: items 1 and 7 presented very low…

Introduction: Past research on source-based writing assignments has hesitated to scrutinize how students actually use information afforded by sources. This paper introduces a method for the analysis of text transformations from sources to texts composed. The method is aimed to serve scholars in building a more detailed understanding of how…

Objective: The purpose is to describe psychometric testing and feasibility of the Tobacco-Free Compliance Assessment Tool (TF-CAT) to measure tobacco-free policy compliance at a public university and medical center. The aims are to (1) investigate concurrent validity by comparing the number of cigarette butts in areas covered by the policy with…

The 21st century is rapidly becoming the age of new and oftentimes confusing innovations in media, so much so that it is frequently referred to as the "new media" (Beach, 2007). It has become evident that we live in an era with extremely complex, and rapidly changing media scenes. Media studies now appears in major institutions of higher education…

Introduction: In research literature there have been a great number of attempts to conceptualize the construct of metacognition over the last three decades. The concept itself has increased its popularity in almost all disciplines ranging from communication to nursing. This popularity has been materialized with a lot of metacognitive inventories…

Objectives: To assess undergraduate helmet use attitudes and behaviors in accordance with the theory of planned behavior (TPB). We predicted helmet wearers and nonwearers would differ on our subscales. Methods: Participants (N = 414, 69% female, 84% white) completed a survey. Results: Principal component analysis and reliability analysis guided…

Objective: To describe the development and psychometric properties of survey measures relevant to eating, physical activity, and weight-related behaviors among young adults. Methods: Focus groups and reliability testing guided the development of the Project EAT-III survey. The final survey was completed by 2287 young adults. Results: The…

Students' evaluations of teaching staff can be considered high-stakes, as they are often used to determine promotion, reappointment, and merit pay to academics. Using Facets, the reliability and validity of one student rating questionnaire is analysed. A total of 13,940 respondents of the Human Science Division of International Islamic University…

At the same time as some faculty committees and corporations are appealing to the use of online ratings from RateMyProfessors.com to inform promotion decisions and nationwide university rankings, others are derogating the site as an unreliable source of idiosyncratic student ratings and commentary. In this paper we describe a study designed to…

Given the history of the past, black South African students from different settings face unique academic and emotional climate. Using the Differential Emotions Scale (DES) which focuses on ten discrete emotions, and building upon Boyle's (1984) seminal work, this study reports a repeated-measure multiple discriminant function analysis for…

In motor learning, a popular area of research has been to examine the importance of where individuals focus their attention during the acquisition of motor skills. Researchers in this area have proposed that, when teaching a motor skill, the instructions used to direct the learner's attention can affect the immediate and long-term retention of…

In exploratory or unrestricted factor analysis, all factor loadings are free to be estimated. In oblique solutions, the correlations between common factors are free to be estimated as well. The purpose of this article is to show how likelihood-based confidence intervals can be obtained for rotated factor loadings and factor correlations, by…

According to social rank theory, involuntary subordination may be adaptive in species that compete for resources as a mechanism to switch off fighting behaviors when loss is imminent (thus saving an organism from injury). In humans, major depression is thought to occur when involuntary subordination becomes prolonged. The present study sought to…