Research indicates that establishing a secure attachment relationship in childhood affects later perceived social support (PSS). In order to test this relationship empirically and to gather comparative information on the separate elements of PSS, two attachment questionnaires and three measures of PSS were administered to 139 white males and 320…

A mapping procedure is presented for studying the construct validity of interest inventories that assess the six interest types defined by J. L. Holland. The 1989 revision of the American College Testing Program Interest Inventory (UNIACT) was used to assess the interests of 1,078 12th-grade students (497 males and 581 females) and 725 adults aged…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development/reliability/validity of a teacher instrument to assess the organizational coupling structure (OCS) of schools. A secondary purpose is to describe the implications of this work for understanding school coupling structure as a complex, "paradoxical" measurement and theoretical…

Education students' attitudes towards mainstreaming are crucial to the future success of the movement toward inclusive education. This study describes the attitudes toward mainstreaming held by undergraduate education students and assesses attitude changes related to knowledge about handicapping conditions and the field of education as well as…

A study involving 169 graduate nursing students (4 males and 165 females) was conducted to assess the construct validity of the Adult Career Concerns Inventory (ACCI). The ACCI is designed to assess career concerns of adults of any age and occupation. Focused on the "planfulness" and exploration factors of the theoretical model of…

The statewide teaching performance assessment instruments being used in Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida were examined. Forty-one reliability and validity studies regarding the instruments in use in each state were collected from state departments and universities. Georgia uses the Georgia Teacher Performance Assessment Instrument. North…

The Personal Profile System (PPS) is a psychological testing instrument that has been widely used. The construct validity of the PPS was studied through a review of the literature. This paper organizes the literature review into three broad categories: the background of the PPS; the reliability of the PPS; and the validity of the PPS. The PPS is a…

Convergent validity and divergent validity were studied in several basic skill areas using the multitrait-multimethod procedure outlined by D. T. Campbell and D. W. Fiske (1959). The academic skill domains considered were: (1) reading; (2) mathematics; (3) writing and language arts; and (4) spelling. A total of 297 students in grades 1 through 5…

The Stanford-Binet: Fourth Edition and Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children were administered in counterbalanced order followed by the Cognitive Domain of the Battelle Developmental Inventory to a sample of 30 nonhandicapped, preschool children (13 males and 17 females). Correlations (corrected for restriction in range) among the three…

Methods that have been employed in McGill University's (Montreal, Quebec) program of research into the nature of learning are described. The methods illustrate four phases of inquiry: conceptualization or model-building; data gathering techniques; data representation; and data analysis. For the university's learning task project, the development…

An overview of the research needed on the new Test of Written English (TWE), a section of the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), looks at research needs in the areas of test validity, test reliability, topic development, and equating. Suggested topics for study include: the uniqueness of the construct measured by the test, in…

In an effort to improve the reliability of the Noncognitive Questionnaire (NCQ), the instrument was revised and the revision's reliability and validity were examined examined with black and white college freshmen. The NCQ measures eight non-traditional or non-cognitive variables that relate to minority student retention. The revised NCQ is…

This study examined the degree to which certain religious/spiritual constructs simply reflect personality variables and to what extent they describe unique components of individual differences. It assessed the incremental validity of several recent or widely used religious measures over personality dimensions in predicting quality of life, racism,…

The present American higher education setting includes the use of Student Evaluations of Instruction (SEIs). This practice has a history that spans a number of decades and is now firmly established as part of the American system of higher education. However, there is a continuing dispute over the use of the information gathered from SEIs, the…

The purpose of this report is to provide a detailed overview of the development and initial validation of the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ). The MSLQ is an 81-item, self-report instrument designed to measure college students' motivational orientations and their use of various learning strategies (Pintrich, Smith, Garcia, &…