This paper will deal, firstly, with the South African context, that cries out for attention to responsible language assessment. The renewed interest in language testing in South Africa is well illustrated in assessments of language ability for educational purposes generally, and more specifically in the assessment of academic literacy. Secondly,…

Self-efficacy is associated with both academic performance and attrition in higher education. Whether it is possible to measure students' academic self-efficacy after admission and prior to commencing higher education (i.e. pre-academic self-efficacy) in a valid and reliable way has hardly been studied. Aims: 1) to evaluate the construct validity…

Purpose: This study was aimed at establishing, through the validation of the "Teaching and Learning Guiding Principles Instrument" (TLGPI), the validity and reliability of the underlying factor structure of the Teaching and Learning Guiding Principles (TLGP) generated by a previous study. Method: A survey method was used to collect data…

Three studies were combined to test the reliability, validity, and factor structure of the imaginative capability scale (ICS). The ICS was a new self-report measure, which was developed to be empirically valid and easy to administer. Study 1 consisted in an exploratory factor analysis to determine the most appropriate structure of the ICS in a…

With reference to the digital natives' debate, there is a gap on digital natives' characteristics. To fill this gap, the Digital Natives Assessment Scale was developed to measure students' assessment of the degree to which they perceived themselves to possess the attributes of digital natives. The scale was developed within the Turkish language…

The study sought to compare factors influencing male and female lecturers' job satisfaction. Cross-sectional survey designs employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted for the study. Simple random sampling was used to select 163 lecturers from the four oldest public universities in Ghana. Celep's (2000) Organisational…

The main objective of this article is to demonstrate with the help of learner corpus data the practical relevance of the phraseological dimension of language for writing assessment in higher education. Phraseological competence is now widely recognized as an important part of fluent and idiomatic language use, but its development has not received…

The quality of teaching in higher education is a topic which has generated heated debate in China, though there has been a remarkable paucity of empirical research into the characteristics of teaching and learning in Chinese universities. This study examined Chinese university students' course experience and its influence on their approaches to…

Teachers' professional knowledge is assumed to be a key variable for effective teaching. As teacher education has the goal to enhance professional knowledge of current and future teachers, this knowledge should be described and assessed. Nevertheless, only a limited number of studies quantitatively measures physics teachers' professional…

University science teachers' technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) is crucial for effective teaching. Although there has been a plethora of studies investigating pre-service and in-service teachers' TPACK, few studies have examined university instructors' TPACK and university students' perceptions of instructors' TPACK. The main…

The results of this study establish the validity of the Student Interest Scale and Student Engagement Scale, as well as associations among teacher communication behaviors, student interest, and engagement. Confirmatory factor analysis indicates that the factor structures of the measures are stable, reliable, and valid. The results indicate…

This article attempts to demonstrate the psychometric properties and evidence of validity for a measure recently proposed in this journal, the Communication Components Inventory (CCI). Across two studies, a total of 903 undergraduate students completed one of the two response formats--dichotomous and scaled--of the CCI and the Multiple…

Scholarly interest in callings is growing, but researchers' understanding of how and when callings relate to career outcomes is incomplete. The present study investigated the possibility that the relationship of calling to work engagement is mediated by work meaningfulness, occupational identity, and occupational self-efficacy--and that this…

The main aim of this study is the comparative examination of the factor structures, corrected item-total correlations, and Cronbach-alpha internal consistency coefficients obtained by different methods used in imputation for missing values in conditions of not having missing values, and having missing values of different rates in terms of testing…

This researcher examined the relationship of bureaucratic structure to school climate by means of an exploratory factor analysis of a measure of bureaucracy developed by Hoy and Sweetland (2000) and the four dimensional measure of climate developed by Hoy, Smith, and Sweetland (2002). Since there had been no other empirical studies whose authors…