Counseling psychologists often work with clients to increase their well-being as well as to decrease their distress. One important aspect of well-being, highlighted particularly in humanistic theories of the counseling process, is perceived meaning in life. However, poor measurement has hampered research on meaning in life. In 3 studies, evidence…

The predictive accuracy of the newly developed actuarial risk measures Risk Matrix 2000 Sexual/Violence (RMS, RMV) were cross validated and compared with two risk assessment measures (SVR-20 and Static-99) in a sample of sexual (n = 85) and nonsex violent (n = 46) offenders. The sexual offense reconviction rate for the sex offender group was 18%…

The Brief Electricity and Magnetism Assessment (BEMA), developed by Chabay and Sherwood, was designed to assess student understanding of basic electricity and magnetism concepts covered in college-level calculus-based introductory physics courses. To evaluate the reliability and discriminatory power of this assessment tool, we performed…

A multiagent connectionist model is proposed that consists of a collection of individual recurrent networks that communicate with each other and, as such, is a network of networks. The individual recurrent networks simulate the process of information uptake, integration, and memorization within individual agents, and the communication of beliefs…

In the context of reviewing an article for this journal (van der Linden & Sotaridona, this issue, pp. 283-304) the topic of unconditional and conditional hypothesis testing came under consideration. While this is hardly a new issue (consider, for example, arguments regarding the chi square vs. Fisher exact test of independence for a 2 x 2…

Confirmatory factor analysis of 25 items on the Child and Adolescent Disruptive Behavior Inventory (CADBI, Version 2.3; G. L. Burns, T. K. Taylor, & J. C. Rusby, 2001) was conducted on teacher ratings of 824 kindergarten children and replicated on 534 children. Model fit was improved when correcting for 2 method effects: (a) adjacent items and…

Oversampling and cluster sampling must be addressed when analyzing complex sample data. This study: (a) compares parameter estimates when applying weights versus not applying weights; (b) examines subset selection issues; (c) compares results when using standard statistical software (SPSS) versus specialized software (AM); and (d) offers…

In the process of education, instead of classifying students according to their insufficiency, teachers should try to get to know them and determine their cognitive, sensorial, and kinetic characteristics. This study on improving learning style inventory, which aims to help classroom teachers determine students' attributes in individualized…

This study sheds light on the achievement gap between two culturally diverse populations in Israel by employing a diagnostic model for analysing responses of a representative sample of Jewish and Arab fourth graders on a national mathematics test. The results indicated large significant differences, in favour of the Jewish group, on most…

This study elaborates the "what works?" question by exploring the effects of variability in program implementation quality on achievement. Particularly, the effects on achievement of computerized assessment of reading were investigated, analyzing data on 51,000 students in Grades 1-12 who read over 3 million books. When minimum implementation…

The responses of 81 Canadian junior and community college students with disabilities were used to develop and evaluate the Scale of Adaptive Information Technology Accessibility for Postsecondary Students with Disabilities (SAITAPSD). This is an 18-item self-administered tool that evaluates computing accessibility for and by students with various…

Researchers acknowledge a strong association between the frequency and duration of environmental reward and affective mood states, particularly in relation to the etiology, assessment, and treatment of depression. Given behavioral theories that outline environmental reward as a strong mediator of affect and the unavailability of an efficient,…

The Early Development Index (EDI) is a teacher-completed checklist, intended to be a population-level tool to measure children's readiness for school and to alert communities to potential developmental problems in children. In response to the increasing popularity of the EDI, this paper provides a critical and timely evaluation and identifies the…

A scaling procedure has been developed for ordering binary parallelogram preference data. The procedure uses minimum variance of the item ranks averaged across persons as the optimization criterion. Two seriation strategies are employed. One is pairwise interchange. The second joins together the vector end points and breaks this circle between…

An analysis of variance approach to estimating reliability is examined. This approach uses an internal-consistency index for estimating the reliability of survey instruments containing ranked items, and is recommended when the relative ranking of item means is of interest to survey researchers. The computation of this index is demonstrated using…