Used stick-figure cartoons depicting various peer social situations to investigate meanings given by children in 14 countries to native terms cognate to bullying. Found that 8-year- olds primarily discriminated nonaggressive and aggressive situations; 14-year-olds discriminated fighting versus physical bullying and verbal bullying versus social…

The cognitive structure of 13 concepts in pulmonary physiology was explored among 112 first-year medical students and among 32 faculty members in three different expertise groups in a knowledge representation study. Purposes were to assess the degree of agreement among faculty members, map students' concept structures, and compare the similarity…

A study was conducted to determine the dimensions underlying the items on a course-instructor survey instrument currently in use to measure graduate student ratings of instruction (attached). Both factor analysis and multidimensional scaling methods were used to analyze the response data, so that the results of each could be evluated, and the two…

Ten poems were read and evaluated for perceived similarity by freshmen and senior college students majoring in engineering and literature, to determine whether their education affected the students' ability to read and subjectively perceive poetry. Results showed that literary instruction did not change the students' ability to perceive poetry.…

Performed correlational and multidimensional scaling analyses to assess the similarity between two models. Results support the similarity in structure between the people-things dimension from Holland's RIASEC (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) model with the affiliation dimension from Wiggins' interpersonal…

The current work examined age differences in the classification of novel object images that vary in continuous dimensions of structural shape. The structural dimensions employed are two that share a privileged status in the visual analysis and representation of objects: the shape of discrete prominent parts and the attachment positions of those…

Examination of a test's internal structure can be used to identify what domains or dimensions are being measured, identify relationships between the dimensions, provide evidence for hypothesized multidimensionality and test score interpretations, and identify construct-irrelevant variance. The purpose of this research is to provide a…

Many multidimensional item response theory (IRT) models have been proposed. A comparison is made between the so-called full information models and the models that use only pairwise information. Three multidimensional models described are: (1) the compensatory model of R. D. Bock and M. Aitken (1981) using the computer program TESTFACT; (2) a model…

In 1976, the Association of American Medical Colleges developed a map-like model to describe the global picture of the U.S. medical school similarities with respect to two loosely defined concepts: an institutional emphasis on research and an emphasis on clinical and graduate medical training. This study is an attempt to replicate the results of…

The question of whether test factor structure is indicative of the test item hierarchy was examined. Data from 1,000 subjects on two sets of five bivalued Law School Admission Test items, which were analyzed with latent trait methods of Bock and Lieberman and of Christoffersson in Psychometrika, were analyzed with an ordering-theoretic method to…

Reports results of a comparison of correlational and multidimensional scaling techniques as tools for analyzing the perceptions of three groups of mathematics teachers (at high school, vocational school, and university levels) of the relative importance of curricular objectives. Discusses the relationship of the two analyses and the implications…

Two sets of real sorting data from 50 college students are used to compare results of multidimensional scaling of raw co-occurrence frequencies or dissimilarity measures (D) and profile distances (delta) to determine which yields a better representation of the underlying structure of 2 sets of stimuli. Slight differences are discussed. (SLD)

The following seven statistical procedures are compared in terms of the ability to recover a unidimensional latent trait from Likert-type data: (1) factor analysis based on Pearson correlations (FA-PR); (2) factor analysis based on polychoric correlations (FA-PL); (3) the graded response model in item response theory (IRT-GRM); (4) internal…

Equatings were performed on both simulated and real data sets using common-examinee design and two abilities for each examinee. Results indicate that effective equating, as measured by comparability of true scores, is possible with the techniques used in this study. However, the stability of the ability estimates proved unsatisfactory. (TJH)

A model of graph comprehension is proposed including perceptual and memory processes. Multidimensional scaling (MDS), cluster analysis, and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used to determine how college students with different mathematical experience read different types of bar graphs. Data were collected at the University of Oklahoma (Norman)…