Under most circumstances, children (and adults) can safely assume that the testimony they hear is true. In two studies, we investigated whether 3-year-olds (N = 100) would continue to hold this assumption even if the person who provided the testimony behaved in an uncertain, ignorant, and/or distracted manner. In Study 1, children were less likely…

Decisions about admissions to medical school are based on assessments of the applicants' cognitive achievements and non-cognitive traits. Admission criteria are expected to be fair, transparent, evidence-based and legally defensible. However, unlike cognitive criteria, which are highly reliable and moderately valid, the reliability and validity of…

Objective: This article reports on the reliability and validity of a new instrument called the Resource Generating Strategies (RGS) Scale, which was created to measure participation in the informal economy. Method: Researchers interviewed 285 adult women who had received domestic violence services, were currently incarcerated, or were residing in…

Objective: The Casey Foster Applicant Inventory-Applicant Version (CFAI-A) is a new standardized self-report measure designed to assess the potential to foster parent successfully. The CFAI-A is described, and results concerning its psychometric properties are presented. Method: Data from a sample of 304 foster mothers from 35 states are analyzed.…

Patient nonattendance to scheduled sessions results in excessive costs to mental health and substance abuse providers and compromises the care of clients. This paper presents a comprehensive review of interventions that have been shown to increase session attendance rates in these settings. Unique to other review papers, reliability estimates were…

Rater biases are of interest to behavior genetic researchers, who often use ratings data as a basis for studying heritability. Inclusion of multiple raters for each sibling pair (M. Bartels, D. I. Boomsma, J. J. Hudziak, T. C. E. M. van Beijsterveldt, & E. J. C. G. van den Oord, 2007) is a promising strategy for controlling bias variance and may…

This study compares five scoring approaches for a test of clinical reasoning skills. All of the approaches incorporate information about the correct item responses selected and the errors, such as selecting too many responses or selecting a response that is inappropriate and/or harmful to the patient. The approaches are combinations of theoretical…

Clinical and health policy research frequently involves health status measurement using generic or disease specific instruments. These instruments are generally developed to arrive at several scales, each measuring a distinct domain of health quality of life (HQOL). Clinical settings are starting to explore how to integrate patient perspectives of…

Among the most knotty problems faced by investigators committed to interpretive practices in disciplines and fields such as sociocultural anthropology, jurisprudence, literary criticism, historiography, feminist studies, public administration, policy analysis, planning, educational research, and evaluation are deciding whether an interpretation is…

The purpose of this study was to examine the psychometric integrity of the "Test of Silent Contextual Reading Fluency" (TOSCRF) by D. D. Hammill, J. L. Wiederholt, and E. A. Allen (2006). The TOSCRF is a recently published assessment of reading fluency for ages 7 years 0 months to 18 years 11 months that can be administered individually or in a…

This research study is the report of an experiment conducted to find out the effects of web based inquiry science environment on cognitive outcomes in Biological science in correlation to Emotional intelligence. Web based inquiry science environment (WISE) provides a platform for creating inquiry-based science projects for students to work…

The No Child Left Behind Act is a mandate from the federal government for education to increase student performance and school accountability. As a result of this mandate, many states have issued the use of high-stakes standardized tests as a means of monitoring schools' accountability. New York State administers the English Language Arts (ELA)…

"Voice" is widely considered to be a feature of effective writing. It's no surprise, then, that voice criteria frequently appear on rubrics used to score student essays in large-scale writing assessments. However, composition theorists hold vastly different views regarding voice and how it should be applied in the evaluation of student writing, if…

Cloud computing is a growing field, addressing the market need for access to computing resources to meet organizational computing requirements. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the factors that influence an organization in their decision whether to adopt cloud computing as a part of their strategic information technology planning.…

Enculturation is the degree to which a person adheres to the values and behaviors of an indigenous or ethnic culture. This study was conducted to develop the Enculturation Scale for Filipino Americans (ESFA). Items were generated from a literature review, interviews with 5 Filipino American academic experts, and a survey of 24 cultural informants.…