Today's Millennials, the first generation to reach their majority in this millennium, often compartmentalize their faith lives from their social and work lives. MidAmerica Nazarene University (MNU) offers a course in Spiritual Formation once each spring. The enrollment for this elective course ranges from twelve to eighteen students per class.…

When respondents answer paper-and-pencil (PP) questionnaires, they sometimes modify their responses to correspond to previously answered items. As a result, this response bias might artificially inflate the reliability of PP questionnaires. We compared the internal consistency of PP questionnaires to computerized questionnaires that presented a…

Because some defendants undergoing evaluation of their competence to stand trial may feign limitations in their ability to understand and participate in the legal process, assessment of their response style is critical. Preliminary research indicates that the Inventory of Legal Knowledge (ILK) has some potential to identify persons feigning…

Stereotypes, expectations, and emotions influence an observer's ability to detect and categorize objects as guns. In light of recent work in action-perception interactions, however, there is another unexplored factor that may be critical: The action choices available to the perceiver. In five experiments, participants determined whether another…

Structural equation modelling is used to measure the existence of a response style (in particular, acquiescence) behind three balanced Likert scales measuring different concepts in a questionnaire for student evaluation of teaching in higher education. Exploration with one sample (n = 1125) and confirmation in a second sample (n = 710) from a…

Existing literature indicates that physical attractiveness positively affects variables such as income, perceived employee quality and performance evaluations. Similarly, in the academic arena, studies indicate instructors who are better looking receive better teaching evaluations from their students. Previous analysis of the website…

This article extends a methodological approach considered by Bolt and Johnson for the measurement and control of extreme response style (ERS) to the analysis of rating data from multiple scales. Specifically, it is shown how the simultaneous analysis of item responses across scales allows for more accurate identification of ERS, and more effective…

In "Assessing the Belief Bias Effect With ROCs: It's a Response Bias Effect," Dube, Rotello, and Heit (2010) examined the form of receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves for reasoning and the effects of belief bias on measurement indices that differ in whether they imply a curved or linear ROC function. We concluded that the ROC…

Previous investigations on the subjective scale of numerical representations assumed that the scale type can be inferred directly from stimulus-response mapping. This is not a valid assumption, as mapping from the subjective scale into behavior may be nonlinear and/or distorted by response bias. Here we present a method for differentiating between…

Questionnaire instruments are frequently administered in digital formats, largely web-based, without much systematic investigation of possible effects from these administration methods. Furthermore, little attention has been given to the contextual lack of control for extraneous factors that may influence user responses. In this study, 263…

We propose and evaluate a memory-based model of Hick's law, the approximately linear increase in choice reaction time with the logarithm of set size (the number of stimulus-response alternatives). According to the model, Hick's law reflects a combination of associative interference during retrieval from declarative memory and occasional savings…

Despite its frequent use to assess effects of environmental and pharmacological variables on short-term memory, little is known about the development of delayed matching-to-sample (DMTS) performance. This study was designed to examine the dimensions and dynamics of DMTS performance development over a long period of exposure to provide a more…

In the presence of test speededness, the parameter estimates of item response theory models can be poorly estimated due to conditional dependencies among items, particularly for end-of-test items (i.e., speeded items). This article conducted a systematic comparison of five-item calibration procedures--a two-parameter logistic (2PL) model, a…

Fanaticism and extremism are increasingly recognized as seminal to psychopathology and distress, especially considering the increase in political unrest and violence over the last decade. In the psychopathological literature, however, the cognitive style associated with extremism and overgeneralization has long been recognized as a risk factor for…

Response-shift bias occurs when participants' initial constructs, such as self-efficacy in teaching science, are incomplete because they do not fully conceptualize something they have yet to experience. This study examines whether elementary pre-service teachers can consistently evaluate constructs such as self-efficacy and attitudes toward…