Research suggests correlations between student gains and college experiences may be an artifact of halo effect. A study examined whether halo error underlies students' self-reported gains, significance of the error, and its effect on the relationship between college experiences and educational outcomes. Results confirm halo error may be an…

Analysis of data on freshman-to-senior developmental gains in 722 University of Tennessee-Knoxville students provides evidence of the advantages of structural equation modeling with latent variables and suggests that the group differences identified by traditional analysis of variance and covariance techniques may be an artifact of measurement…