Depression, anxiety, and sleep disturbance are common among school-age children and can impair functioning. Schools are in a unique position to assess and refer these children for intervention services, but standardized screening is underutilized. One challenge with screening is the lack of psychometrically strong mental health screening tools…

The Defining Issues Test (DIT) has been the dominant measure of moral development. The DIT has its roots in Kohlberg's original stage theory of moral judgment development and asks respondents to rank a set of stage typed statements in order of importance on six stories. However, the question to what extent the DIT-data match the underlying stage…

Background: Most empirical investigations in survey research have been conducted using self-reported or self-evaluated item responses. Such measures are common because they are relatively easy to obtain and are often the only feasible way to assess constructs of interest. In order to improve on the validity of self-reports it has become a common…

This study was an investigation of student beliefs about their EFL education, and it was based upon the subjective task value component of the expectancy-value theory, a prominent theory of achievement motivation. The participants were three cohorts of Japanese public elementary school students (Cohort 1 from 2008; Cohort 2 from 2009; and Cohort 3…

In the present article, the authors report on the development of a scale for the measurement of the militant extremist mind-set. A previous pilot study identified 56 statements selected from writings of various terrorist groups as well as from psychological, historical, and political texts on terrorism. These statements, together with measures of…

Enculturation is the degree to which a person adheres to the values and behaviors of an indigenous or ethnic culture. This study was conducted to develop the Enculturation Scale for Filipino Americans (ESFA). Items were generated from a literature review, interviews with 5 Filipino American academic experts, and a survey of 24 cultural informants.…

This paper provides analytic evaluations of expected (marginal) true-score measures for binary items given their item response theory (IRT) calibration. Under the assumption of normal trait distributions, marginalized true scores, error variance, true score variance, and reliability for norm-referenced and criterion-references interpretations are…

Re-examined the 13-year lifespan study of moral and evaluative reasoning conducted by C. Armon, who interviewed 23 females and 19 males ranging in age from 5 at first test time (1977) to 86 at the fourth interview (1989). Rasch analysis of Armon's data show that the measures used tap a single underlying dimension of reasoning. Discusses results…