Surveys provide a critical source of data for scholars, yet declining response rates are threatening the quality of data being collected. This threat is particularly acute among organizational studies that use key informants--the mean response rate for published studies is 34 percent. This article describes several response enhancing strategies…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the cognitive processes involved in answering survey questions. It also briefly discusses how the cognitive viewpoint has been challenged by other approaches (such as conversational analysis). Design/methodology/approach: The paper reviews the major components of the response process and summarizes work…

Subscore reporting under item response theory models has always been a challenge partly because the test length of each subdomain is limited for precisely locating individuals on multiple continua. Diagnostic classification models (DCMs), providing a pass/fail decision and associated probability of pass on each subdomain, are promising…

In the time before an upcoming exam, anxiety is an omnipresent emotion that students may choose to regulate. To date, emotion regulation strategies have been examined in everyday life, but little is known about how these strategies work in exam-related contexts. Therefore, our aim was to explore the effectiveness of several emotion regulation…

Discourses of reading for pleasure have seldom addressed the multiple and complex digital media practices of children and young people or the changing nature of literacy. This article explores the affective encounters that are generated in the relations between readers, digital texts and things by applying Bennett's notion of enchantment. Using…

The purpose of this article is twofold. The first is to provide evaluative information on the recovery of model parameters and their standard errors for the two-parameter item response theory (IRT) model using different estimation methods by Mplus. The second is to provide easily accessible information for practitioners, instructors, and students…

This study examined the use of Bayesian analysis methods for the estimation of item parameters in a two-parameter logistic item response theory model. Using simulated data under various design conditions with both informative and non-informative priors, the parameter recovery of Bayesian analysis methods were examined. Overall results showed that…

Fear-relevant stimuli such as snakes and spiders are thought to capture attention due to evolutionary significance. Classical conditioning experiments indicate that these stimuli accelerate learning, while instructed extinction experiments suggest they may be less responsive to instructions. We manipulated stimulus type during instructed aversive…

Reality-monitoring errors occur when internally generated thoughts are remembered as external occurrences. We hypothesized that sleep-dependent memory consolidation could reduce them by strengthening connections between items and their contexts during an afternoon nap. Participants viewed words and imagined their referents. Pictures of the…

Emotions are a core semantic component of human communication. Since counsellors are humans we assume that their own state of emotions could affect their intuitional effort when taking decisions concerning their clients. Therefore, the accuracy of detected emotions by counsellors could be doubtful. And this highlights the need for complementing…

Despite common operationalization, measurement efficiency of computerized adaptive testing should not only be assessed in terms of the number of items administered but also the time it takes to complete the test. To this end, a recent study introduced a novel item selection criterion that maximizes Fisher information per unit of expected response…

Each semester faculty spend time creating and revising their courses. Course revision is a fact of life in education. Revisions are more commonly just general updates, like cosmetic changes, moving dates, and updating broken links. A true course revision looks at the pedagogy and structure of a course and is a process that requires time and…

In this digital ITEMS module, we introduce the framework of nonparametric item response theory (IRT), in particular Mokken scaling, which can be used to evaluate fundamental measurement properties with less strict assumptions than parametric IRT models. We walk through the key distinction between parametric and nonparametric models, introduce the…

Objective: Our objectives were to measure reporting differences between sexual behavior data from daily diary and retrospective estimates and to assess the utility of using smartphones to collect sexual behavior data from a college student population. Participants: Eighty-six participants (68 women, 18 men) completed the study. Methods: For…

A core indicator of success at University is the grade a student achieves following a period of study. A student's ability to achieve expected grades is often understood in terms of learning and study processes that the student is capable of, chooses to adopt, or masters. However, psychology tells us that our self-efficacy is a major determinant…