The relationship between job skills and specific tasks is difficult to analyze, since any one task may require multiple skills. In this study, a sequence of statistical evaluations was conducted to examine the reliability of a subject matter expert panel's association of tasks and job skills and the factor structure of the task by job skill…

A 12-item Self-Confidence in Teaching Scale was completed by 1,176 students entering a teacher preparation program and 861 teacher candidates completing their final semester. For the total sample, gender subsamples, and "entry"/"exit" subsamples, principal axis factor analyses yielded only one factor with an eigenvalue greater…

Measurement fidelity (reliability, factor structure, and validity) of Aschenbach's Youth Self-Report scale was studied with 226 adolescents at a psychiatric hospital. Findings confirm convergent validity and reliability of four of the measure's seven narrowband syndromes, and seven meaningful subdimensions were extracted from the other three…

Implementation of a career ladder in the Cave Creek Unified School District (Arizona), with a five-factor teacher performance evaluation and accompanying placement algorithm successfully dispersed teachers across plan levels. After three years, there have been no teacher grievances filed, and teachers feel ownership and authority over the career…

Reexamined Counselor Evaluation Rating Scale (CERS) using confirmatory factor analysis. Analyzed 185 self-rated CERs. Findings suggest that, when counselors use CERS to rate themselves, different factors may emerge from those emerging when experienced supervisors use CERS to evaluate supervisee progress and performance. (Author/NB)

Examined dimensions of personal loss from such events as divorce, career change, geographical relocation, illness, institutional change, aging, injury, death, or loss of one's personal dreams among 251 college students. Findings support notion that personal loss is multidimensional human experience involving unique interaction of several important…

Validity studies conducted with the Stanford Binet Intelligence Scale: Fourth Edition (SB:FE) are reviewed. Results support its validity as a measure of general mental ability and that it can distinguish between groups of youngsters with differing intellectual abilities. Recommendations are made for use of the SB:FE. (SLD)

Examined factor structure of Reasons for Living Inventory (RFL) and its internal consistency for 128 high school and 145 college students. Means were higher than those of adults who reported never considering suicide. Goodness of Fit Index was poor, suggesting that factors in teenagers' reasons for living are different from those of adults.…

Use of the Orthogonal Cultural Identification Scale with 2,048 Mexican American and American Indian adolescents found that, as predicted, identification with one culture was independent of identification with another; cultural identification was strongly rooted in the family; and the scale was factor invariant across gender, grade level, and…

Parents and teachers completed their respective versions of the Rating Scale of Children's Actual Behavior (S. Harter, 1985) to assess five domains of competence for 321 third graders and 403 sixth graders. Five factors were found in both scales, and two higher-order factors also emerged. All subscales showed a high degree of discriminant…

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's indicators project identified 635 educational indicators in 13 categories in 3 blocks: contexts, processes, and results. Analysis of the educational features of 28 high-income countries demonstrates relationships between the three blocks of indicators and suggests that about 50 indicators…

A series of 4 studies involving 547 college students and community adults report the development of the Pain Catastrophizing Scale, its validity with clinical and nonclinical samples, and its correlation with measures of related constructs. The scale provides information about heightened responses to aversive procedures or events. (SLD)

Studied the factorial invariance of a seventh grade reading assessment across groups of 600 general education and 1,128 limited English proficient students. Fit statistics generally supported invariance across all groups for factor loadings and intercepts, but invariance was not supported for the error variances. (SLD)

This study evaluated Holland's (1973, 1985, 1997) structural hypotheses--circular order and circumplex--in two populations in China at both the subtest (Activities, Competencies, Occupational Preferences, and Self-ratings on Abilities) and the entire test levels of the Self-Directed Search (SDS; Holland, 1994). Confirmatory factor analyses…

This study compared factor structures of the Occupational Work Ethic Inventory (OWEI) for self-perceived work attitudes of manufacturing employees and their supervisors' ratings of those same employees. The purpose of the study was to evaluate construct validity through comparative factor analysis. Four factors were generated through principal…