This book explores the Capability Approach (CA) as an alternative critical lens through which to regard early childhood education (ECE) curricula. The CA framework is a counter narrative to the narrow instrumentalism that reduces education to a mere process of academic skills acquisition for a future workplace. Primarily the book draws on the…

One of the most salient requirements for international educational research is the use of comparable measures. For the comparison of student performance across countries the use of item response theory (IRT) scaling techniques facilitates the collection of cross-nationally comparable measures. But there is also a need for valid and comparable…

With increasing reliance being placed on the results of their surveys, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) recognized a need for these survey results to be valid and reliable. As part of the work of the Statistical Analysis Group in Education (SAGE), an effort was undertaken to investigate validity and reliability in survey…

This study sought to develop a valid set of scales in the cognitive and affective domains for measuring the quality of life of university students. In addition the study attempted to illustrate the usefulness of Thomas Piazza's procedures for constructing valid scales in educational research. Piazza's method involves a multi-step construction of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the factor structure of a Factors Influencing Pursuit of Higher Education (FIPHE) Questionnaire which addresses factors influencing a person's decision to pursue higher education. Researchers used a literature-based, rational factors approach to develop the questionnaire; the three-part study included a…