Motivation to learn is an important component of education, particularly in the field of educational technology in which the instructor's physical presence is increasingly absent. The complexity of the many factors that contribute to student motivation renders this domain difficult to measure. The Instructional Materials Motivation Survey (IMMS)…

Business simulations are innovative instruction models for active or cooperative learning. In this paper, we look at the social constructionist roots of these education models in light of the current efforts to enhance employability skills in undergraduate and graduate studies. More specifically, we analyse the role of business simulations in…

The authors explored the factors contributing to student learning in the context of business simulation. Our results suggest that social interaction and psychological safety had a positive impact on knowledge development in student groups, and that this synergistic knowledge development enabled students to form complex mental models. Implications…

Since all commonly used latent trait models assume a unidimensional test, the applicability of the procedure to obviously multidimensional tests is questionable. This paper presents the results of the application of latent trait, traditional, and factor analyses to a series of actual and hypothetical tests that vary in factoral complexity.…

This paper illustrates the transformation of a raw data matrix into a matrix of associations, and then into a factor matrix. Factor analysis attempts to distill the most important relationships among a set of variables, thereby permitting some theoretical simplification. In this heuristic data, a correlation matrix was derived to display…

Four methods for determining the dimensionality of a set of test items were compared: (1) linear factor analysis; (2) residual analysis; (3) nonlinear factor analysis; and (4) Bejar's method. Five artificial test data sets (for 40 items and 1500 examinees) were generated, consistent with the three-parameter logistic model and the assumption of…

This study was undertaken to determine the factor analytic structure of patient management problems (PMPs) and to determine whether such factors are stable for different groups taking the same examination and for the same group over time. PMPs attempt to simulate, in written form, the process that a physician goes through in managing a patient.…

A set of tests that might be reasonably used as provisional criterion measures in research on scientific thinking, particularly creative thinking, were developed and an assessment was made of the suitability of these tests as criterion variables from the standpoint of their psychometric properties. The Tests of Scientific Thinking are performance…