Student well-being has gradually become a topic of interest in higher education, and the accurate, valid, and reliable measure of well-being constructs is crucial in the South African context. This study examined item bias and configural, metric and scalar invariance of the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) for South African first-year…

Person-fit analyses are commonly used to detect aberrant responding in self-report data. Nonparametric person fit statistics do not require fitting a parametric test theory model and have performed well compared to other person-fit statistics. However, detection of aberrant responding has primarily focused on dominance response data, thus the…

One part of COVID-19's staggering impact on education has been to suspend or fundamentally alter ongoing education research projects. This article addresses how to analyze the simple but fundamental example of a multi-cohort study in which student assessment data for the final cohort are missing because schools were closed, learning was virtual,…

The present study aims to validate the Flourishing Scale (FS) in a convenience sample of 233 special education teachers. The FS's psychometric properties were investigated using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). EFA had a one-factor solution that explained 49.9% of the variance, a Cronbach's alpha internal…

The ability to effectively identify students for advanced learning opportunities has been an ongoing issue within the field of gifted education. Common criteria to guide the design and evaluation of identification systems has been essentially non-existent. In this article we provide a practical guide for evaluating and reflecting on the…

Background: PIRLS 2021 results revealed that South African Grade 4 learners performed significantly lower compared to other countries in reading comprehension and that they did not reach the standardised international mean score of 500. It was also evident from the results that English learners performed relatively higher than isiZulu learners.…

Measurement invariance holds when a latent construct is measured in the same way across different levels of background variables (continuous or categorical) while controlling for the true value of that construct. Using Monte Carlo simulation, this paper compares the multiple indicators, multiple causes (MIMIC) model and MIMIC-interaction to a…

The problem of local item dependencies (LIDs) is very common in personality and attitude measures, particularly in those that measure narrow-bandwidth dimensions. At the structural level, these dependencies can be modeled by using extended factor analytic (FA) solutions that include correlated residuals. However, the effects that LIDs have on the…

This report summarizes some of the evidence supporting interpretations of scores from the enhanced ACT, focusing on reliability, concurrent validity, predictive validity, and score comparability. The authors argue that the evidence presented in this report supports the interpretation of scores from the enhanced ACT as measures of high school…

This paper analyses the reliability and accuracy of the relationships between migration and employment status when estimated using a linked data set. The analysis will be carried out using a new source, the "Labour and Geographical Mobility Statistics," which is provided by the Spanish Statistical Office. This statistic is constructed by…

Previous research found bias in the estimate of the overall fixed effects and variance components using multilevel meta-analyses of standardized single-case data. Therefore, we evaluate two adjustments in an attempt to reduce the bias and improve the statistical properties of the parameter estimates. The results confirm the existence of bias when…

In the article 'How Long Is My Toilet Roll--A Simple Exercise in Mathematical Modelling' several models of increasing complexity are introduced and solved to calculate indirectly the length of paper on a toilet-roll. All these results are presented without errors. The authors of this comment believe the error analysis of measurements made in a…

Module Overview: In this digital ITEMS module, Dr. Jodi M. Casabianca provides a primer on the "hierarchical rater model" (HRM) framework and the recent expansions to the model for analyzing raters and ratings of constructed responses. In the first part of the module, she establishes an understanding of the nature of constructed…

A common procedure when conducting physics experiments is to repeat a measurement several times to calculate the mean and standard deviation. That might be the only instruction we give to students as a means to minimize random errors. However, that technique does not guarantee that the answer will be correct. It might give the same wrong answer…

This study explores the performance of classical methods for detecting publication bias--namely, Egger's regression test, Funnel Plot test, Begg's Rank Correlation and Trim and Fill method--in meta-analysis of studies that report multiple effects. Publication bias, outcome reporting bias, and a combination of these were generated. Egger's…