Objectives: To evaluate the performance of the US Centers for Disease Control's health-related quality of life (HRQOL) scale among 522 college students. Methods: Chi-square analysis assessed scale construct validity and analysis of variance (ANOVA) with selected tobacco, alcohol, and substance use variables assessed known-groups validity of the…

The undermining effect of extrinsic reward on intrinsic motivation remains unproven. The key unresolved issues are construct invalidity (all four definitions are unproved and two are illogical); measurement unreliability (the free-choice measure requires unreliable, subjective judgments to infer intrinsic motivation); inadequate experimental…

Institutional accountability for performance and quality is an evolving topic with immeasurable appeal. Data and sources are abundant, but validated measures and meaningful information are scarce. While pursuing an approach centered on construct validity, this study transforms complex data into useful information. Correlation analysis reveals…

The present study uses item response theory (IRT) to establish comparability between the English and Portuguese versions of the Goal Instability Scale (GIS), a measure of generalized motivation. A total of 2,848 American and 679 Portuguese high school students were administered their respective language versions of the GIS. Results showed only…

Through a rigorous process of selecting educational psychology's most useful affective constructs, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) constructed the Students' Approaches to Learning (SAL) instrument, which requires only 10 min to measure 14 factors that assess self-regulated learning strategies, self-beliefs,…

The thought of Samuel Messick has influenced language testing in 2 main ways: in proposing a new understanding of how inferences made based on tests must be challenged, and in drawing attention to the consequences of test use. The former has had a powerful impact on language-testing research, most notably in Bachman's work on validity and the…

The 50-item Violence-Related Attitudes and Beliefs Scale (V-RABS) includes three subscales measuring possible causes of violent behavior (environmental influences, biological influences, and mental illness) and four subscales assessing possible controls of violent behavior (death penalty, punishment, prevention, and catharsis). Each subscale…

This paper studied the construct validity of the Receptivity to Change Inventory (RCI) as a measure of teacher receptivity to change. The sample consisted of all teachers in 94 schools in 6 districts in southern Louisiana. Usable data were received from 1,921 teachers from elementary schools and secondary schools during the spring of 1992. The…

One difficulty in studying the long-term impact of divorce on children has been the lack of a reliable and valid measure of parental conflict for divorced parents. Items for a post-divorce conflict scale were written and tested using 32 male and 63 female college students from divorced families for Study 1 and 60 male and 75 female students from…

This study attempted to validate the use of academic growth and development items from Tennessee alumni surveys as measures of program quality and effectiveness at the University of Tennessee (UTK), Knoxville. The argument is made that it is essential that the instruments used to assess students educational outcomes be valid measures of the goals…

The validity of the Self Concept as a Learner Revised (SCALR) inventory was studied. The construct issue of academic self-concept was explored by comparing the SCALR to the academic portion of the Multidimensional Self Concept Scale (MSCS). The SCALR contains 44 items (four scales of 11 items each). The SCALR version for grades 7 through 12 was…

A previous research report described a prototype measure of the skill of negotiation in interpersonal competency and the results of an initial validation study of that measure. This report describes the results of two further validation studies of the computer simulation negotiation skill measure. In study 1, 37 second- and third-year law students…

Research indicates that establishing a secure attachment relationship in childhood affects later perceived social support (PSS). In order to test this relationship empirically and to gather comparative information on the separate elements of PSS, two attachment questionnaires and three measures of PSS were administered to 139 white males and 320…

A mapping procedure is presented for studying the construct validity of interest inventories that assess the six interest types defined by J. L. Holland. The 1989 revision of the American College Testing Program Interest Inventory (UNIACT) was used to assess the interests of 1,078 12th-grade students (497 males and 581 females) and 725 adults aged…

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development/reliability/validity of a teacher instrument to assess the organizational coupling structure (OCS) of schools. A secondary purpose is to describe the implications of this work for understanding school coupling structure as a complex, "paradoxical" measurement and theoretical…