Schools have become the most common setting for youth to receive additional supports--including access to mental health services serving as an entry point for identification and subsequent provision of these services. Many schools rely on office discipline referral (ODR) or suspension data as informal screeners for students who may need additional…

An important problem in higher education is to find the most suitable admission procedure that can distinguish between students with high academic potential and future dropouts. Admissions usually rely on pre-enrolment achievement measures; therefore, it is crucial that these selection criteria have high predictive validity on academic…

Using a sample of healthy youth (n = 466, 10 to 18 yr), we report the predictive utility of vertical jump power (VJ Power, W) for predicting bone strength. We measured VJ Power using mechanography and an indicator of bone strength, i.e., height-adjusted total bone mineral content less head (TBLH BMC, g), using DXA. Growth curve models were used to…

School climate is increasingly recognized by scholars and policymakers as a crucial factor associated with students' educational experiences. Hence, practitioners endeavor to equitably measure and improve school climate to promote favorable student academic and behavior outcomes. Unfortunately, school climate research is fragmented, and a…

Improving teacher selection is an important strategy for strengthening the quality of the teacher workforce. As districts adopt commercial teacher screening tools, evidence is needed to understand these tools' predictive validity. We examine the relationship between Frontline Education's TeacherFit instrument and newly hired teachers' outcomes. We…

Guided by Self-Determination Theory, we offer an integrative and fine-grained analysis of teachers' classroom motivating style (i.e., autonomy support, structure, control, and chaos) to resolve existing controversies in the literature, such as how these dimensions relate to each other and to educationally important student and teacher outcomes.…

As evidence-based interventions are scaled, fidelity of implementation, and thus effectiveness, often wanes. Validated fidelity measures can improve researchers' ability to attribute outcomes to the intervention and help practitioners feel more confident in implementing the intervention as intended. We aim to provide a model for the validation of…

The goal of this study was to extend research on scale contextualization (i.e., frame-of-reference effect) to the decision making styles construct, compare the effects of contextualization across three unique decision style scales, and examine the consequences of scale contextualization within an item response theory framework. Based on a mixed…

Test development is a complicated process that demands examining various factors, one of them being writing items of varying difficulty. It is important to use items of a different range of difficulty to ensure that the test results accurately indicate the test-taker's abilities. Therefore, the factors affecting item difficulty should be defined,…

The Stranger Face Trust scale (SFT) and Imaginary Stranger Trust scale (IST) are two new self-report measures of generalized trust that assess trust in strangers--both real and imaginary--across four trust domains. Prior research has established the reliability and validity of SFT and IST, but a number of measurement validation tests remain.…

Considerable past classroom learning environment research has focused on the primary and secondary levels of education and the subject areas of science and mathematics. The current study is distinctive in its focus on university business statistics learning environments. For the first time, we validated and applied the widely-used What Is…

Parent engagement in schools is often precipitated by a thorough and genuine assessment of parents' needs, priorities, and perceptions of their children's schools. This study reports on the development and validation of the Parent Perceptions of Overall School Experiences Scale. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) examined the factorial validity…

Self-report inventories are commonly administered to measure social-emotional learning competencies related to college and career readiness. Inattentive responding can negatively impact the validity of interpreting individual results and the accuracy of construct validity evidence. This study applied nine methods of detecting insufficient effort…

This study describes the development and validation of the Higher Education Student Engagement Scale (HESES). The psychometric evaluations of the scale included: (i) factor structure, (ii) internal consistency, and (iii) criterion validity. The HESES was developed based on our proposed five-factor model of student engagement, which was evolved…

The purpose of this three-manuscript dissertation was to examine the construct and predictive validity of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (i.e., teaching, cognitive and social presence) through a confirmatory factor analysis, meta-analysis, and qualitative synthesis. The first paper was a confirmatory factor analysis study that…