Various person reliability coefficients, including within- and between-occasion consistency measures, were investigated using the test and retest responses of 123 undergraduates on the Basic Personality Inventory (BPI). Results indicate person reliability may be a multidimensional concept, and that certain item consistency measures are confounded…

The influence of scale format on results was examined. Two Likert type formats, one with all choice points defined and one with only end-points defined, were administered. Each subject completed half the items in each format. Results indicated little difference between forms, nor did subjects indicate a format preference. (Author/DWH)

Characteristics of six different indicators of response distortion on the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI) (L. Morey, 1991) were evaluated by having 134 college students complete the PAI under positive impression management, malingering, and honest responding conditions. All six indicators could distinguish actual and feigned responses. (SLD)

Three personality measures were administered twice each with an interval of four weeks between administrations, and the response consistency of these tests was analyzed. The evidence is equivocal. The confounding of consistency effects with other sources of variance remains a problem. (Author/CTM)

Either positive or negative test instructions and two item types (attitude or personality) were administered to undergraduates. Students were more likely to respond true when receiving positive instructions. Students receiving attitude test instructions were not more likely to respond true than students receiving personality test instructions.…

Examined group differences in self-reporting anxiety for one hundred chronic pain patients, an equal number of college students, and two smaller comparison samples. Pain patients, relative to nonpatients, acknowledged dramatically fewer total signs of anxiety. Also, pain patients endorsed significantly more somatic than cognitive indicators of…

Item-response changing as a function of test anxiety was investigated. Data supported the hypothesis that high test-anxious students make more item-response changes than low test-anxious students. Also, both high- and low-anxious students profit to a similar extent proportionally from answer changing. (Author/GK)

The University of Wisconsin at Madison offers free counseling sessions to help take the trauma out of taking tests. (Author/MLF)

The susceptibility to faking on the Tennessee Self Concept Scale was examined among college students. Additionally, groups of respondents, instructed to respond in a "random" fashion to pre-determined numbers of items in the TSCS, were subjected to a plausibility analysis of their test response vectors using the Rasch measurement model.…

The sensitivity of creative thinking measured by the Torrance Tests with an experimenter-induced response set was investigated. Subjects (n=198) were divided into four groups and each was given a unique set of instructions. A multivariate Dunnett test showed that the Torrance Tests were highly sensitive to experimenter manipulation. (Author/DWH)

A study that investigated the effect on return rates of personalizing the cover letter and including precoded personal information on a mail questionnaire is discussed. A survey of 196 students dropping out of courses offered by a distance education university provided the opportunity to conduct the study reported. (Author/MLW)

In examining response style effects on various commonly used fixed-response formats, Likert-type formats were relatively consistently affected regardless of the number of format categories. Nonanchored numbers were less affected. Across types, strong correlations for the linear formats and human faces made their use problematic. (Author/CM)

The empirical evidence does not support the prevailing conventional wisdom that it is advisable to mix positively and negatively worded items in psychological measures to counteract acquiescence response bias. An experiment, evaluating subjects' ability to respond accurately to both positive and reversed items on a questionnaire, analyzed post-hoc…

Research has shown that students who take notes remember more than do students who do not take notes, and that test performance is enhanced for students who are given an opportunity to review their notes compared to those who are not. However, research has not offered instructors and students specific guidelines regarding when review of notes in…

Two experiments were performed to study inductive reasoning as a set of thought processes that operates on the structure, as opposed to the content, of organized memory. The content of the reasoning consisted of inductions concerning the names of mammals, assumed to occupy a Euclidean space of three dimensions (size, ferocity, and humanness) in…