A measurement scale has been developed to assess secondary students' energy literacy--a citizenship understanding of energy that includes cognitive as well as affective and behavioral items. Instrument development procedures followed psychometric principles from educational and social psychology research. Initial exploration of the measure yielded…

Objective: This study describes the development and validation of the Sorokin Psychosocial Love Inventory (SPSLI) measuring love actions toward a former spouse. Method: Classical measurement theory and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were utilized with an a priori theory and factor model to validate the SPSLI. Results: A 15-item scale…

Although there is a growing interest in the discrepancy between parents and their adolescent children in relation to career expectations, there is no existing, psychometrically sound scale that directly measures adolescent-parent career congruence or incongruence. This study reports the development and initial validation of the Adolescent-Parent…

The Self-Efficacy Parent-Report Scale was designed to assess parent perceptions of self-efficacy of their children aged 7 to 17 years. Internal aspects of validity indicated a marginal fit of the data to the unidimensional model. External facets of validity indicated the Self-Efficacy Parent-Report Scale had excellent convergent and discriminant…

This study explored student self-perceptions of writing skills in journalism and mass communication programs at thirteen public state universities in the mid-Atlantic region. Factor analysis revealed seven sets of perceptions among 860 students. A Media Writing Self-Perception Scale was constructed and found to be reliable. The authors propose…

Assessment is critical to rehabilitation practice and research, and self-reports are a commonly used form of assessment. This study examines a gender effect according to item wording on the "Perceived Stress Scale" for adults with multiple sclerosis. Past studies have demonstrated two-factor solutions on this scale and other scales measuring…

Full-information item bifactor analysis is an important statistical method in psychological and educational measurement. Current methods are limited to single-group analysis and inflexible in the types of item response models supported. We propose a flexible multiple-group item bifactor analysis framework that supports a variety of…

If classification in a limited number of categories is the purpose of testing, computerized adaptive tests (CATs) with algorithms based on sequential statistical testing perform better than estimation-based CATs (e.g., Eggen & Straetmans, 2000). In these computerized classification tests (CCTs), the Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT) (Wald,…

We expect that word knowledge accumulates gradually. This article draws on earlier approaches to assessing depth, but focuses on one dimension: richness of semantic knowledge. We present results from a study in which three distinct item types were developed at three levels of depth: knowledge of common usage patterns, knowledge of broad topical…

Interpreting the image-language interface in multimodal texts is now well recognized as a crucial aspect of reading comprehension in a number of official school syllabi such as the recently published Australian Curriculum: English (ACE). This article outlines the relevant expected student learning outcomes in this curriculum and draws attention to…

We translated and report on the psychometric properties of English and French versions of two reading difficulties screening tools for junior/community college students. We administered the Adult Reading History Questionnaire-Revised (ARHQ-R) (Parrila, Georgiou, & Corkett, 2007) to 1889 students enrolled in compulsory language courses in…

There has been a growing interest in the use of integrated tasks in the field of second language testing to enhance the authenticity of language tests. However, the role of text integration in test takers' performance has not been widely investigated. The purpose of the current study is to examine the effects of text-based relational (i.e.,…

The digital revolution is shifting print-based textbooks to digital text, and it has afforded the opportunity to incorporate meaningful learning strategies and otherwise separate metacognitive activities directly into these texts as embedded support. A sample of 89 undergraduates read a digital, expository text on the basics of photography. The…

This article draws on previously employed methods for conducting fidelity studies and applies them to an evaluation of an unprescribed intervention. We document the process of assessing the fidelity of implementation of the Math Recovery first-grade tutoring program, an unprescribed, diagnostic intervention. We describe how we drew on recent…

In a follow-up to a previously published study (Epstein, Schmidt, & Warfel, 2008), an ethnically-diverse sample of 13,578 people in 47 countries (mainly the United States and Canada) took an online test that measures 4 trainable competencies that have been shown to enhance creative expression in individuals. The new study confirmed that the…