This study first found that an adaptation of the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Competence and Social Acceptance for Young Children exhibited construct validity and test-retest reliability in assessing preschool children's sensitivity to age-related differences in peers' developmental abilities. Second, children with disabilities were viewed as less…

Reviews the issues and evidence on "measuring" student intelligence. The construct validity of "intelligence," the role of cultural context as a modifier of the meaning of test results, and the lack of meaningful predictive validity of IQ tests are discussed. Results conclude that measuring intelligence currently has no contribution to…

Results indicated that the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scales II, one subscale of the Parent-Adolescent Communication Scale, and all but one subscale of the Children's Report of Parental Behavior Inventory produced equivalent measures of an English-speaking Hispanic sample and an Anglo-American sample. (BC)

Factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis of the Educators Survey, an inventory to assess teacher burnout, for scores from 133 beginning elementary and secondary school teachers support a 3-factor structure. The level of construct validity of the instrument is considered promising for assessing teacher burnout. (SLD)

The construct validity of hypothesized survey items and data reduction procedures for selected psychosocial constructs frequently used in breast cancer screening research were investigated in telephone interviews with randomly selected samples of 1,184 and 903 women and a sample of 169 Hispanic clinic clients. Validity of the constructs is…

Discusses the role of the Rasch model IRT in evaluating two subtests of the Occupational English test and argues for its use in exploring test constructs and in considering the implications of the empirical analysis presented for the validity of communicative language tests involving speaking and writing skills. (39 references) (Author/JL)

In this study an artificial intelligence assessment tool used disease-by-feature frequency estimates to create disease prototypes for nine common causes of acute chest pain. The tool then used each subject's prototypes and a pattern-recognition-based decision-making mechanism to diagnose 18 myocardial infarction cases. (MLW)

Investigated the concurrent validity of various PLACE (Program for Licensing Assessments for Colorado Educators) tests, noting how they fared on judgments of more contemporary notions of validity. Analysis of seven iterations of PLACE tests from five Colorado institutions supported the construct validity of the PLACE. This paper reports the…

The dimensionality of students' attitudes toward regular classroom activities and enrichment clusters were studied with 379 urban elementary school students using two instruments developed for the study. Analyses allowed examination of the construct validity of the scores from both measures while indicating that derived factors were not the same…

In 1994 the Federation of State Medical Boards and the National Board of Medical Examiners instituted a three-step U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE). Step one of the USMLE may be vulnerable to legal challenge on the basis of minority group bias and lack of construct validity. (SLD)

A 3-factor solution of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale--Revised (WAIS-R) in 260 adults with suspected head injury suggested relatively good construct validity for the factors, based on correlations with neuropsychological tests. Findings are discussed in terms of the multidimensional nature of neuropsychological tests and WAIS-R factors.…

Examined relations among measures of child language derived from observations of 20-month-olds' speech with mothers, experimenter assessments, and maternal reports. Found that structural equation modeling supported strong relations among the three sources, the loading of multiple measures on a single latent construct of vocabulary competence, and…

This paper describes the testing and refinement of an instrument for identifying and measuring Problem Formulation and Resolution (PFR) in online asynchronous discussions (OADs). The instrument was used to analyse a transcript of an OAD designed specifically for PFR with 30 participants in an undergraduate course for teachers in training. Results…

The authors evaluate the validity of the Social Provisions Scale for physical activity among adolescent Black (n = 896) and White (n = 823) girls. The girls completed the scale and measures of subjective norms and physical activity in the eighth and ninth grades. Within the sample of White girls, the Social Provisions Scale contained 24 items that…

Two aspects of the reliability of multidimensional measures can be distinguished: the amount of scale score variance that is accounted for by all underlying factors (composite reliability) and the degree to which the scale score reflects one particular factor (construct reliability). Confidence intervals for composite and construct reliabilities…