The ability to purposefully access, reflect, and use evidence from educational research (Educational Research Literacy) is expected of future professionals in educational practice. Based on the presented conceptual framework, a test instrument was developed to assess the different competency aspects: Information Literacy, Statistical Literacy, and…

This study designed 1) to develop a multidimensional thinking styles scale based on theory of mental self-government for sixth grade student 2) to investigate quality of the developed scale 3) to study profile of styles of sixth grade student and a relation of profile of styles of student in each dimension and background of gender and grade with…

Limited studies have investigated the latent autistic traits in the mainland Chinese population for autism spectrum conditions (ASC). This study explored the psychometric properties of a Mandarin Chinese version of the CAST in a sample consisting of 737 children in mainstream schools and 50 autistic cases. A combination of categorical data factor…

Despite the limitations of overgeneralizing cutoff values for confirmatory factor analysis (CFA; e.g., Marsh, Hau, & Wen, 2004), they are still often employed as golden rules for assessing factorial validity in sport and exercise psychology. The purpose of this study was to investigate the appropriateness of using the CFA approach with these…

The study aimed to examine the factor structure of the Obsessive Beliefs Questionnaire (OBQ), the most widely used measure of dysfunctional beliefs in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Multiple exploratory methods (exploratory factor analysis, cluster analysis by variable, multidimensional scaling) were used to examine the questionnaire.…

The current research aimed to develop a multidimensional measure of career locus of control (LOC) and examine its predictive validity on objective and subjective career success among Chinese employees. Items of career LOC were generated based on literature review of the significant predictors of career success, as well as the open-ended responses…

Back in 1975, the European Union (EU) Council of Ministers defined the poor as "individuals or families whose resources are so small as to exclude them from the minimum acceptable way of life of the Member State in which they live". This widely quoted definition leaves room for discussion about what can be considered a "minimum…

This paper focuses "interest in science" as one of the attitudinal aspects of scientific literacy. Large-scale data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2006 are analysed in order to describe student interest more precisely. So far the analyses have provided a general indicator of interest, aggregated over all…

Foster parents licensed in a central Canadian province were contacted by telephone and invited to participate in a survey that included the question "What are the challenges of fostering a child with the same values, beliefs, and traditions as you?" Participants sorted all responses to the question into concepts that were analyzed using…

The "Revised Learning Process Questionnaire" has been part of the development of a conceptual understanding of how students learn and what motivates them to engage in particular tasks. We obtained responses from 329 student volunteers at a mid-sized public university in the southeast USA. We first investigated whether the psychometric…

Classroom context and climate are inherently classroom-level (L2) constructs, but applied researchers sometimes--inappropriately--represent them by student-level (L1) responses in single-level models rather than more appropriate multilevel models. Here we focus on important conceptual issues (distinctions between climate and contextual variables;…

The use of images of older people in the British advertising media has been under-researched to date. Further, previous research in any country has tended to examine such images from an "a priori" framework of general impressions and stereotypes of older people. This study addresses these issues with British consumers' (n = 106)…

The purpose of the present study was to explore the prior educational and employment experiences of staff members in urban Aboriginal human services agencies. A total of 44 individuals employed by one of three community sites within one Canadian inner city generated 85 unique responses to the question: "What were your employment and education…

It was hypothesized that students' value orientations are connected to their experience of motivational interference in a conflict between a school- and a leisure-related activity as well as to school marks as indicators of learning outcomes. In a self-report study with Italian adolescents (N = 433; M = 14.5 years) using a school-leisure conflict…

An emic approach was used to test the structural validity and applicability of Holland's (1997) RIASEC (Realistic, Investigative, Artistic, Social, Enterprising, Conventional) model in Iceland. Archival data from the development of the Icelandic Interest Inventory (Einarsdottir & Rounds, 2007) were used in the present investigation. The data…