Researchers in psychology are increasingly using model selection strategies to decide among competing models, rather than evaluating the fit of a given model in isolation. However, such interest in model selection outpaces an awareness that one or a few cases can have disproportionate impact on the model ranking. Though case influence on the fit…

Growth mixture modeling (GMM) has become a more popular statistical method for modeling population heterogeneity in longitudinal data, but the performance characteristics of GMM enumeration indexes in correctly identifying heterogeneous growth trajectories are largely unknown. Few empirical studies have addressed this issue. This study considered…

"Talk of the Town" is a community led approach to supporting the speech, language and communication (SLC) skills of children and young people, aged 0-19, living in areas of social disadvantage. It is delivered by the Communication Trust. This evaluation reports on a randomised controlled trial undertaken with 2696 pupils in 64 primary…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine region, age, and sex profiles of physical fitness in Hungarian youth. Method: A sample of 2,602 Hungarian youth aged 10 to 18 years old completed a series of physical fitness field tests: the Progressive Aerobic Cardiorespiratory Endurance Run (PACER) fitness test, body mass index (BMI), percent…

We propose a new limited-information goodness of fit test statistic C[subscript 2] for ordinal IRT models. The construction of the new statistic lies formally between the M[subscript 2] statistic of Maydeu-Olivares and Joe (2006), which utilizes first and second order marginal probabilities, and the M*[subscript 2] statistic of Cai and Hansen…

A marginal maximum a posteriori (MMAP) procedure was implemented to estimate item parameters in the generalized graded unfolding model (GGUM). Estimates from the MMAP method were compared with those derived from marginal maximum likelihood (MML) and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedures in a recovery simulation that varied sample size,…

Most national Physical Education (PE) curriculums worldwide are based on a variety of outcome goals. The most important are physical activity and fitness, self-actualization, motor skill development and social development. Capturing PE Teacher Education pre-service teachers' beliefs toward these outcomes may offer a useful insight into the process…

This study gathered, analyzed, and compared perspectives of students who were honors-eligible but never began the program, students who began in honors and discontinued their enrollment, and those who were persisting in honors. Broadly speaking (and not surprisingly), the responses of students persisting in honors reflected the most positive…

Quantitative research in vocational education and training (VET) is routinely affected by missing or incomplete information. However, the handling of missing data in published VET research is often sub-optimal, leading to a real risk of generating results that can range from being slightly biased to being plain wrong. Given that the growing…

Background/Context: Little research has directly examined whether principal leadership can increase the degree to which teachers work together regularly in focused ways around content. Prior research has shown that reform efforts seeking to alter the process of teaching can be successful if teachers collaborate to build capacity and improve…

Understanding students' intentions to study science at upper-secondary school, at university, and to follow science careers continues as a central concern for international science education. Prior research has highlighted that students' science confidence has been associated with their intentions to study science further, although…

Differential item functioning (DIF) of items has become an important issue in test fairness and equity in large-scale assessments. DIF occurs when subgroups of test takers have equal trait levels but differ in their probabilities of a correct response. DIF items may threaten the validity of test scores for subgroups and can mislead researchers…

The article extends and applies previous approaches by Klauer and Fischer to the statistical evaluation of ability changes in tests conforming to the Rasch model (RM). Exact uniformly most powerful unbiased (UMPU) hypothesis tests and uniformly most accurate (UMA) confidence intervals (CIs) for the amount of change can be constructed for each…

This study elaborates the Rasch differential item functioning (DIF) model formulation under the marginal maximum likelihood estimation context. Also, the Rasch DIF model performance was examined and compared with the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) procedure in small sample and short test length conditions through simulations. The theoretically known…

Following the trend in science and engineering education generated by the visible impact created by the Force Concept Inventory (FCI), the investigator developed a Physics of Semiconductors Concept Inventory (PSCI). PSCI fills the need of standardized concept tests for undergraduate education in photonics and electrical engineering. The structure…