The conceptions of intelligence of Taiwanese Chinese were investigated in two studies involving 68 and 434 participants (college students and community adults). Five factors emerged in the second study for ratings of frequency of characteristics of intelligence identified in the first study, and four factors emerged from ratings of importance of…

Examines the psychometric properties of scores on the Work Preference Inventory (WPI), particularly its factor structure and scale reliabilities. Analyses of data from 200 undergraduates showed qualified support for the inventory and its use for developmental purposes. States that the WPI may be a useful tool in stimulating students to examine…

Examined gender differences in the patterns of process use for smoking cessation using the Processes of Change Questionnaire. Results demonstrated the structure of the measure for men and women was invariant at the level of the variance-covariance matrices and that the hypothesized two-factor model fit the data. Only state of change predicted the…

Introduces the College Student Social Support Scale (CSSSS) and presents initial psychometric data. Six-hundred and seven college students ranging in age from 18 to 31, across three studies, participated in the development and validation of this new self-report measure. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses suggest that the CSSSS is a…

Proposes a factorial procedure for investigating differential distractor functioning in multiple choice items that models each distractor with a distinct distractibility parameter. Results of a simulation study show that the parameters of the proposed modeling were recovered very well. Analysis of 10 4-choice items from a college entrance…

Applied factor analysis to the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Third Edition (WISC-III) scores for 505 gifted students, to evaluate the construct validity of the WISC-III with this population. Results are consistent with the hypothesis that subtests that emphasize speed of reading are not valid for gifted children and suggest that an…

Investigated the construct validity of the implied and theoretical structures of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-III (WAIS-III). Results using the standardization sample of 2,450 adults and adolescents indicate that the WAIS-III provides an excellent measure of the four-factor model and a general factor, but they do not support the construct…

Analyzes the factor structure of the Woodcock Reading Mastery Tests-Revised (WRMT-R) using data from a sample of special education students. Woodcock asserted that the WRMT-R measured two important aspects of reading ability: Basic Skills and Reading Comprehension. Results of the analyses indicated a robust single factor and provided little…

Psychological Sense of Community (PSOC) theoretically comprises four components (Membership, Influence, Fulfillment of Needs, and Shared Emotional Connection), but existing measures of the components are psychometrically lacking. The current study sought to develop valid and reliable measures of the four theoretical components by building on and…

The development of the 29-item Asian American Racism-Related Stress Inventory (AARRSI) is presented. In the first study, data from 161 Asian American respondents were subjected to an exploratory factor analysis, which yielded 3 subscales composed of Socio-Historical Racism (14 items), General Racism (8 items), and Perpetual Foreigner Racism (7…

The aim of this study was the preliminary development of a short 10-item version of the CiOQ. First, 10 items were selected on the basis of their high factor loadings in previously published work. Two studies are then reported. In Study 1, the 10 items were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis using data from a sample of college students…

Oddi's 24-item Continuing Learning Inventory (OCLI) is an instrument that has been used frequently to measure self-directed learning. Although three previous studies have assessed OCLI's underlying dimensions, the conflicting results of those studies prompted this further investigation that used a series of factor analyses of the 250 responses…

This study focused on misspecifications in composing parcels to represent a latent construct. Two measurement design factors, item reliability and intercorrelations among parcels, defined 12 true unidimensional parcel models. Deviations from the true model were examined via a 2-facet measurement model in which items and parcels represented the 2…

An essential part of the human capacity for language is the ability to link conceptual or semantic representations with syntactic representations. On the basis of data from spontaneous production, Tomasello (2000) suggested that young children acquire such links on a verb-by-verb basis, with little in the way of a general understanding of…

Pedagogical agents are gaining acceptance as effective learning tools (Baylor & Ryu, 2003; Moreno, Mayer, Spires & Lester 2001; Moreno, 2004). The increase in the use of agents highlights the need for standardized measurements for evaluating user performance in these environments. While learning gains are a primary variable of interest in such…