Quantitative Psychology Commons^™

Determinants Of Corporal Punishment And Severe Physical Punishment In Egypt: A Mixed-Methods Analysis For Child Protection Policy, Marwa Moustafa Nassef

Theses and Dissertations

Corporal punishment (CP) and severe physical punishment (SPP) remain a major public health, child rights, and child protection policy concern. In Egypt, despite legislative reforms, survey-weighted analysis of the 2021 Egypt Family Health Survey (EFHS) 2021 (CAPMAS, 2022) reveals prevalence rates of 60.5% for CP and 27.4% for SPP among children aged 1–14 (author’s calculations using EFHS-2021, n=7623), yet evidence distinguishing the determinants of routine corporal punishment from escalation to severe physical punishment remains limited in low- and middle-income contexts. Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological framework, this mixed-methods study identifies key drivers of CP and its escalation to SPP among Egyptian …

Examining The Glat As A Measure Of Ai Literacy, Hunter R. Castleton

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The current study examined the Generative AI Literacy Assessment Test (GLAT) as a promising test of AI literacy due to its content, which is grounded in relevant AI literacy theory, and its design as a cognitive measure of AI literacy. To examine the GLAT, data were collected from a sample of 543 graduating seniors at James Madison University (JMU) who took the GLAT as part of a longer series of tests. Their responses were first analyzed to assess the test’s item characteristics and internal structure. Following this initial analysis, a final item set was established to ensure that low-quality items …

The Impact Of Free Vs. Fixed Factor Correlations On Parameter Recovery In Multidimensional Irt Models, Stephanie Leroy

Dissertations, 2020-current

This dissertation investigated how cross-loading specification and factor-correlation treatment influence parameter recovery in multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) models. Two simulation studies extended Hosseinzadeh and Cole (2024) by examining whether freely estimating factor correlations improves recovery of item parameters, factor correlations, and latent traits. Study 1 used a compensatory multidimensional two-parameter logistic (M2PL) model with two correlated dimensions and 20 dichotomous items. Manipulated conditions included cross-loading specification (correctly specified vs. ignored), proportion of cross-loaded items, magnitude of cross-loadings, true factor correlation, and factor-correlation treatment during estimation (freely estimated vs. fixed to zero). Study 2 extended the design to a multidimensional …

An Equity-Based And Culturally Responsive Bill Of Rights For Early Childhood Students Of Color With Exceptionalities, Evette Simmons-Reed, Michelle Frazier Trotman Scott, Gloria Tardash, Mildred Boveda, Donna Y. Ford

Perspectives on Early Childhood Psychology and Education

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated existing disparities in early intervention (EI) and early childhood special education (ECSE) services for culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) disabled children, exposing critical gaps in access, services and support. systemic inconsistencies in implementation, training, and funding, remain barriers limit opportunities for CLD students to benefit, despite the aims of the Individuals with Disabilities Improvement Act (IDEA). To address these inequities, this manuscript proposes an expanded and updated Culturally Responsive Equity-Based Bill of Rights for EI and ECSE. Building upon Ford and colleagues' (2018) work, this revised document extends protections to children aged zero to five, emphasizing …

Latent Transition Analysis: A Statistical Method For Identifying Underlying Subgroups Over Time, Holmes Finch

Perspectives on Early Childhood Psychology and Education

Researchers working in early childhood research are often interested in assessing change over time in multiple variables. In addition, they may wish to ascertain whether there exist subgroups in the data with respect to these variables, and whether/how membership in these groups is related. Latent transition analysis (LTA) provides such researchers with a useful tool for investigating questions around such groups, including their composition, frequency, and the likelihood of moving from one to another at different points in time. The purpose of this manuscript is to provide a full demonstrate of LTA and show how it can be used to …

Comparison Of Multidimensional Models For Extreme Response Styles, Holmes Finch, Brian French

Perspectives on Early Childhood Psychology and Education

Self-administered scales are ubiquitous throughout the social sciences. Therefore, it is crucial that they properly reflect the measured latent trait(s), and are not influenced by other factors. One potential threat to validity is the response style favored by an individual completing the items. In particular, a tendency to engage in extreme responding (ERS) can result in a tendency to provide responses in the outer range of the response scale, independent of the actual level of the response to the item. The purposes of this study was to demonstrate how these models can be used to account for ERS in practice, …

Using Multilevel Modeling To Understand Nested Data, Holmes Finch

Perspectives on Early Childhood Psychology and Education

Researchers in the social sciences often work with nested data, in which individuals are collected in higher level clusters. For example, educational research often involves working with samples in which students are nested within schools. Standard data analyses, such as regression and analysis of variance (ANOVA), yield statistically biased results when this nested structure is ignored. One widely used and effective approach for handling such nested data is multilevel modeling. The purpose of this manuscript is to review the basics of multilevel modeling and to provide the reader with a fully worked example in which the analytic approach and results …

Using Effect Sizes, Confidence Intervals, And The Bayes Factor To Better Understand The T-Test, Analysis Of Variance, And Regression Results, Holmes Finch

Perspectives on Early Childhood Psychology and Education

Null hypothesis testing is a widely used paradigm for assessing research hypotheses across the social sciences. Despite their ubiquity, researchers have discussed a number of problems and limitations to hypothesis testing and have suggested alternatives that might provide greater depth and explanation of research results. The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of several such alternatives and to show how they can be integrated with one another and with null hypothesis testing in order to provide a more holistic view of research hypotheses.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Methodological Innovations For Advancing Early Childhood Educational And Psychological Research, Anthony Mangino Ph.D.

Perspectives on Early Childhood Psychology and Education

The goal of this special issue is to provide you, the inquisitive reader and developmental scientist, with some of the methodological tools to aid in augmenting your analytic capacity.

The Effects Of Fluency Building On Undergraduate Student Performance, Lauren B. Shibley

Dissertations

Online learning has become integral to higher education, with enrollment steadily increasing over the past decade and accelerating during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research highlights the importance of flexibility, learner autonomy, and self-regulated learning skills in this environment, with studies demonstrating that strategies such as mastery-based, self-paced instruction, fluency training, and timely feedback support student engagement and academic success. Early work adapting personalized instruction for online use (Pear & Crone-Todd, 1999) and subsequent studies on fluency practice (Quigley et al., 2018; Urbina et al., 2019) emphasize how these supports can improve concept retention. Despite these advances, more quantitative research is needed …

The Item Response Warehouse: What It Is, How To Use It, And Targets For Potential Improvements, Savira D. Nadela, Hansol Lee, Nishka Jain, Ayaan Gupta, Xingyi Zhang, Benjamin W. Domingue

Chinese/English Journal of Educational Measurement and Evaluation | 教育测量与评估双语期刊

The Item Response Warehouse (IRW) is a repository of harmonized item response datasets designed to support secondary analysis and methodological research in psychological and educational measurement. This paper serves as a practical guide for researchers interested in using the IRW. We describe the structure of IRW datasets and the quantitative and qualitative metadata available for dataset selection, and we demonstrate how researchers can navigate the IRW website to explore and compare available tables. We further show how the IRW R and Python packages can be used to filter datasets programmatically, download response-level data, and generate standardized citations for reproducible research …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Measuring Student Growth To Support Organizational Learning Using The Academic Progress Indicator (Api): An Evaluation Of Chicago Public Schools’ New Student Progress Metric, Benjamin Boer

Reports, Analyses, and other Publications

A report on early implementation of the Academic Progress Indicator (API), a student progress measure developed by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) as part of its new Continuous Improvement and Data Transparency (CIDT) system. The API represents a significant step forward in how schools and communities can use data to understand and support student learning.

Improving Home Security Through User Centered Device Positioning, Lalith Nadipalli

Theses and Dissertations

In today’s world, where technology is advancing rapidly and security threats are becoming more complex, the need for effective home safety measures is more critical than ever. Homeowners are increasingly turning to a variety of smart devices, such as smoke detectors, carbon monoxide detectors, and security cameras, to protect their living spaces against potential dangers like burglary, fire, and environmental hazards. These devices offer essential protection, acting as both early warning systems and visual surveillance tools. However, their effectiveness largely hinges on how well they are placed within the home. Proper placement of these safety devices ensures that they provide …

Unraveling The Impact Of Cognitive Test Anxiety On Academic Performance Among Adolescents: The Case Of Minority And Majority Communities, Zulfiqar Ullah Siddiqui, Wael M. F. Abuhassan

An-Najah University Journal for Research - B (Humanities)

Background: Within the Indian society and its many communities, adolescents exhibit a wide range of individual differences, including cognitive abilities, learning styles, and personality traits. These differences can influence how students perceive and cope with test anxiety and related stress. Objective: The primary goal of this research study was to investigate the influence of cognitive test anxiety on academic performance in adolescents from both minority (Muslims) and majority (Hindus) communities in India. Method: Based on descriptive-inferential research design, a sample of 450 students was selected, with 223 students representing the majority community and the remaining 227 students representing the minority …

Investigating The Direction Of Item Parameter Bias In The Presence Of Rapid Guessing, Sarah Alahmadi

Dissertations, 2020-current

Inadequate examinee test-taking effort is especially concerning when the results of low-stakes tests are used to inform high-stakes policy or psychometric decisions. Although abundant is the literature on the negative impact of low test-taking effort (e.g., Wise & DeMars, 2005) and ways to address it (e.g., Alahmadi & DeMars, 2024; Lau et al., 2009), integrating it into assessment practices has long been in a rudimentary stage. The findings presented in this dissertation serve as a clarion call for testing professionals to reinforce efforts that bridge research and practice. The current study investigated how rapid guessing (RG)—a form of non-effortful test-taking …

The Standards Will Never Be Enough: A Racial Justice Extension, Mya Poe, Maria Elena Oliveri, Norbert Elliot

Buros Center: Professional Staff Publications

Since 1952, the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing has provided criteria for developing and evaluating educational and psychological tests and testing practice. Yet, we argue that the foundations, operations, and applications in the Standards are no longer sufficient to meet the current U.S. testing demands for fairness for all test takers. We propose racial justice extensions as principled ways to extend the Standards, through intentional actions focused on race and targeted at educational policies, processes, and outcomes in specific settings. To inform these extensions, we focus on four social-justice concepts: intersectionality derived from Black Feminist Theory; responsibility derived …

Item Development And Psychometric Testing Of Work Stress Scale, Andhita Ramadhania Pristiawati, Laura Francisca Sudarnoto, Angela Oktavia Suryani

International Conference on Assessment and Learning (ICAL)

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic demanded employees work from home (Ishak & Mangundjaya, 2020). The work-from-home regulation provides several advantages, including high work flexibility. However, this regulation also creates excessive workloads and requires employees to work overtime due to various challenges from superiors with short deadlines. This situation encouraged researchers to develop an accurate psychological scale to identify the employees/ working stress. The scale comprised physical and mental individual responses to managing their uncomfortable work environment. It consists of 48 items measuring four dimensions: role overload, role conflict, role ambiguity, and role responsibility. The participants responded to the items by …

Validation Of The Child And Adult Social Support Scale (Casss) Which Measures Social Support In The Indonesian Version, Endah Mastuti, Fajrianthi, Fitri Andriani

International Conference on Assessment and Learning (ICAL)

Social support has an important role, so that students in online learning can reduce the various problems they face. Social support here comes from parents, teachers, classmates, close friends, and the school itself as an institution. Based on this, it is necessary to do research related to social support to get an overview of the support from whom students need in online learning. Furthermore, this can be used as input to intervene in the problems faced by students. To conduct this research, it is necessary to have a measuring tool to conduct social support research. One of the comprehensive measuring …

Applying Visual Methods To Document The History Of Psychological Testing: A Qualitative Approach, Analay Perez, Janet F. Carlson, Buros Center For Testing At The University Of Nebraska-Lincoln

Buros Center: Professional Staff Publications

The history of psychological testing is critical to many areas of applied psychology. Assessment forms a mainstay of clinical practice, second only to psychotherapy (Meyer et al., 2001). In industrial/organizational psychological practice, employee selection depends on testing to assess applicant qualifications. In educational contexts, testing is central to the evaluation of academic performance and college readiness, in addition to determining eligibility for various types of special educational services.

The history of testing is deeply rooted in myriad psychological specialties (Carlson & Geisinger, 2021). This fact prompted a qualitative examination and integration of three distinct historical threads identified by the proposal …

Writing While Black: African American Vernacular English (Aave) And Perceived Writing Performance, Jaylin N. Nesbitt

Masters Theses, 2020-current

In the education system, there have historically been inequities that have severely disadvantaged Black students academically. One area in which these inequities surface is on writing assessments in the form of lower scores. I argue that because the U.S. education system is centered around Standard American English (SAE), it disadvantages those from different linguistic backgrounds, specifically Black students, as they are most likely to be speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Although there are theoretical justifications for this, past literature has not empirically tied inequities on writing assessments to Black students’ use of AAVE. The current study used Natural …

Student Voices In Teacher Evaluation: A Multilevel, Latent Factor Investigation Of Teacher Quality, Kathleen J. Hoff

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Teacher effectiveness is a key driver of student achievement but persistently difficult to measure. Although precollege student surveys are one cost-effective alternative to traditional observation measures, little empirical research has been conducted on their factor structure. The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity of the Tripod Survey, a widely adopted precollege survey, as a measure of teacher effectiveness. The dataset was the Measures of Effective Teaching (Year 1, N = 1,024 Grade 9 classroom sections, 20,500 students; Year 2, N = 488 Grade 9 classroom sections, 8,658 students). The dynamic model of educational effectiveness guided the study. …

Evaluation Of Modern Missing Data Handling Methods For Coefficient Alpha, Katerina Matysova

College of Education and Human Sciences: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

When assessing a certain characteristic or trait using a multiple item measure, quality of that measure can be assessed by examining the reliability. To avoid multiple time points, reliability can be represented by internal consistency, which is most commonly calculated using Cronbach’s coefficient alpha. Almost every time human participants are involved in research, there is missing data involved. Missing data means that even though complete data were expected to be collected, some data are missing. Missing data can follow different patterns as well as be the result of different mechanisms. One traditional way to deal with missing data is listwise …

Examining The Effects Of Specifying Bayesian Priors On The Wald's Test For Dif, Paulius Satkus, Christine E. Demars

Department of Graduate Psychology - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Applied Example Of A Two-Tier Multiple-Group Testlet Model, Paulius Satkus, Christine E. Demars

Department of Graduate Psychology - Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Context And Regulation Of Homeschooling: Issues, Evidence, And Assessment Practices, Janet F. Carlson

Buros Center: Professional Staff Publications

The article discusses salient factors that influence the current context within which homeschooling occurs. Individual states have applied various approaches to establish regulations that both preserve the rights of homeschooling parents and fulfill the state’s obligation to ensure that its residents receive the education to which they are constitutionally entitled. Case and ethnographic studies or research involving small and selected samples often appear in outlets associated with homeschool advocacy groups or in outlets that are not mainstream. The paucity of empirical evidence derived from methodologically strong research paradigms has led to little certainty about many aspects of homeschooling including its …

An Analytical Study About The Dialectical Use Of Statistical Significance In Psychological And Educational Research, عايش صباح Dr

International Journal for Research in Education

The statistical significance has been adopted more than 300 years ago, It has served an important purpose in promoting research in social sciences, however, there has been much controversy over the misuse and interpretation of the statistical significance test.Compelling criticisms of statistical significance testing can be found in virtually all areas of the social and life sciences, economics, sociology, education and psychology. Because it is the overwhelmingly dominant statistical method in these sciences, criticisms need to be taken seriously.

Yet, after half a century of cogent arguments against statistical significance and calls to adopt alternative practices some disciplines, such as …

Test Emotions, Value, And Self-Efficacy: A Longitudinal Model Predicting Examinee Effort And Performance On A Low-Stakes Test, Paulius Satkus

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The validity of scores from low-stakes tests may be compromised by examinee motivation. Expectancy-Value theory (EV) has been used to frame the antecedents of examinee motivation in low-stakes testing contexts. According to EV theory, the perceived value of the test and the expectancy to succeed on the test directly affect examinee effort, which then affects test performance. Cross-sectional research studies in low-stakes testing contexts offer some support of EV theory. Control-Value theory (CV) serves as another theory to understand motivation toward a task. CV theory encompasses the constructs of expectancy and value from EV theory, but incorporates test emotions as …

Mathematics Attitudes And Mathematics Performance: Novel Approaches Towards Noncognitive Educational Measurement, Applications To Large-Scale Assessment Data, And Examinations Of Multigroup Invariance, Kalina Gjicali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Academic performance is predicted by a multitude of demographic, contextual, cognitive, and noncognitive constructs. The noncognitive factors of achievement in mathematics that have previously been explored in depth are study skills, collaborative problem-solving, confidence, self-efficacy, and personality traits (Kyllonen, 2012). Limited applied research has explored the predictive value of noncognitive factors such as attitudes and beliefs in mathematics achievement – even though attitudes towards mathematics are a promising avenue for understanding the variability in mathematics achievement. The current research uses the theory of planned behavior (TPB) to explain high school students’ performance in mathematics in a series of three studies. …

Considerations In S-Χ2: Rest Score Or Summed Score, Priors, And Violations Of Normality, Christine E. Demars, Derek Sauder

Department of Graduate Psychology - Faculty Scholarship

The S-χ2 item fit index is one of the few item fit indices that appears to maintain accurate Type I error rates. This study explored grouping examinees by the rest score or summed score, prior distributions for the item parameters, and the shape of the ability distribution. Type I error was slightly closer to the nominal level for the total-score S-χ2 for the longest tests, but power was higher for the rest-score S-χ2 in every condition where power was < 1. Prior distributions reduced the proportion of estimates with extreme standard errors but slightly inflated the Type I error rates in some conditions. When the ability distribution was not normally distributed, integrating over an empirically-estimated distribution yielded Type I error rates closer to the nominal value than integrating over a normal distribution.