Robust evidence links students' positive mental health with academic achievement and provides a compelling rationale for developing and refining strength-based assessments. The Social Emotional Health Survey--Secondary (SEHS-S) assesses adolescents' social and emotional skills and positive psychological dispositions. Previous studies provide…

The Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) is a high stakes summative assessment that was designed to measure pre-service teacher readiness. We examined the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of trained PACT evaluators who rated 19 candidates. As measured by Cohen's weighted kappa, the overall IRR estimate was 0.17 (poor strength of…

Parent-teacher relationship (PTR) quality is linked to child and family-school functioning and may be especially important in the school adjustment of autistic children. However, measurement of PTR quality has been limited by inconsistency in the use of measures, a paucity of two-informant measurement, and limited psychometric consideration. We…

Because the pandemic exacerbated chronic absenteeism in many parts of the country, the need to understand how schools can improve student attendance has never been greater. Accordingly, this study breaks new ground by examining high schools' contributions to attendance after accounting for individual students' prior absenteeism and other…

Rigorous longitudinal research demonstrates that certain Mindsets, Essential Skills, and Habits (MESH) can help students succeed in college, career, and life. Assessing students' MESH competencies can give educators valuable information that helps them understand students' strengths and identify the areas in which students need additional support.…

Objective: Although Hispanic adolescents in the USA are often the focus of sexual health interventions, their response to survey measures has rarely been assessed within evaluation studies. This study documents the test-retest reliability of a wide range of self-reported sexual health values, attitudes, knowledge and behaviours among Hispanic…

Our UC Santa Barbara research team engages in ongoing efforts to enhance and validate the Social Emotional Health Surveys (Primary, Secondary, and Higher Education). The initiative to enhance the secondary version is supported by an Institute of Education Sciences grant (#R305A160157, 2016-2020), which provides funding to refine, standardize, and…

The Climate Change Attitude Survey is composed of 15 Likert-type attitudinal items selected to measure students' beliefs and intentions toward the environment with a focus on climate change. This paper describes the development of the instrument and psychometric performance characteristics including reliability and validity. Data were gathered…

Evaluation is a key component to learning about the effectiveness of a program. This article provides descriptive statistics of the newly developed National 4-H Common Measures (science, healthy living, citizenship, and youth development) based on data from 721 California 4-H youth. The measures were evaluated for their reliability and validity of…

Understanding genetic drift is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of biology, yet it is difficult to learn because it combines the conceptual challenges of both evolution and randomness. To help assess strategies for teaching genetic drift, we have developed and evaluated the Genetic Drift Inventory (GeDI), a concept inventory that measures…

The purpose of this study was to investigate if there is a significant difference in the following: (a) nurses' likelihood to remain in geriatrics between age groups (those over 40 years of age and those under 40 years of age); (b) nurses' likelihood to remain in geriatrics and personality traits; (c) nurses' likelihood to remain in geriatrics…

The psychometric properties of the Coping With Acculturative Stress in American Schools (CASAS-A) scale were examined using a sample of 148 Latino middle school students. CASAS-A is a self-report scale designed to identify students in need of culturally responsive social-emotional interventions due to having high levels of school-related…

The first step in the Validity and Reliability Study summarizes the history and purpose of California's quality rating and improvement system (QRIS), reviews findings from other QRIS evaluation studies, and describes the approach to validating the system in California. The majority of this report focuses on providing context for the California…

A previous study examined role stress in relation to work outcomes; in this study, we added job structuring antecedents to a model of role stress and examined the moderating effects of locus of control. Structural equation modeling was used to assess the plausibility of our conceptual model, which specified hypothesized linkages among teachers'…

In recent years, colleges and universities have made improvements in assisting students to transition to the university community during their first year on campus, but often times this support fades away once students move into their sophomore and junior years. Theories such as McMillan and Chavis (1986) Sense of Community show that students need…