This study examines the effect of school socioeconomic composition on student achievement growth in Australian schooling, and its relationship with academic composition utilising the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) dataset. Previous research has found that school composition predicts a range of schooling outcomes. A…

We are pleased that our article prompted this series of four commentaries and that we have this opportunity to respond. We address each in turn. Duckworth and Kaufman and Agars discussed, respectively, two broad issues concerning the validity of selection systems, namely, the expansion of the predictor domain to include noncognitive predictors of…

Rapid guessing (RG) is a form of non-effortful responding that is characterized by short response latencies. This construct-irrelevant behavior has been shown in previous research to bias inferences concerning measurement properties and scores. To mitigate these deleterious effects, a number of response time threshold scoring procedures have been…

For misguided reasons, social scientists have long been reluctant to use gain scores for estimating causal effects. This article develops graphical models and graph-based arguments to show that gain score methods are a viable strategy for identifying causal treatment effects in observational studies. The proposed graphical models reveal that gain…

Measurement invariance with respect to groups is an essential aspect of the fair use of scores of intelligence tests and other psychological measurements. It is widely believed that equal factor loadings are sufficient to establish measurement invariance in confirmatory factor analysis. Here, it is shown why establishing measurement invariance…

In an earlier paper, we presented methods for estimating achievement gaps when test scores are coarsened into a small number of ordered categories, preventing fine-grained distinctions between individual scores. We demonstrated that gaps can nonetheless be estimated with minimal bias across a broad range of simulated and real coarsened data…

The article examines two important aspects of data quality in self-completion surveys of young people, taking advantage of a unique data source: Understanding Society: the United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study. Young persons aged 10-15 are asked to complete a self-administered paper questionnaire at annual intervals. The number of completed…

Researchers commonly compare means and other statistics across groups with little concern for whether the measure possesses strong factorial invariance (i.e., equal factor loadings and intercepts/thresholds). When this assumption is violated, inaccurate inferences associated with statistical and practical significance can occur. This manuscript…

The first year of higher education is one of the most critical and challenging times in a student's life and choosing a specific course of study can be very difficult. Often, first-year students realize they have different expectations from the courses of study they chose and perceive that their abilities, skills, interests, and ambitions for a…

This meta-analysis examines the effectiveness of technology-assisted second language (L2) vocabulary learning as well as identifies factors that may play a role in their effectiveness. We found 34 studies with 2,511 participants yielding 49 separate effect sizes. Following the procedure developed by Hunter and Schmidt (2004), we corrected for…

This study aimed to examine the validity of reasons for living (RFL) and the protective role they may play against suicidal ideation in college students in South Korea. A total of 277 undergraduate students participated by completing the College Student Reasons for Living Inventory (CS-RFL), along with measures of suicide risk including…

Ho and Reardon (2012) present methods for estimating achievement gaps when test scores are coarsened into a small number of ordered categories, preventing fine-grained distinctions between individual scores. They demonstrate that gaps can nonetheless be estimated with minimal bias across a broad range of simulated and real coarsened data…

The normative, developmental changes in affect-biased attention during the preschool years are largely unknown. To investigate the attention bias for emotional versus neutral faces, an eye-tracking measurement and free viewing of paired pictures of facial expressions (i.e., happy, fearful, sad, or angry faces) and nonface pictures with neutral…

We consider two-level models where a continuous response R and continuous covariates C are assumed missing at random. Inferences based on maximum likelihood or Bayes are routinely made by estimating their joint normal distribution from observed data R[subscript obs] and C[subscript obs]. However, if the model for R given C includes random…

The need to develop measures that tap into constructs of interest to social work, refine existing measures, and ensure that measures function adequately across diverse populations of interest is critical. Item response theory (IRT) is a modern measurement approach that is increasingly seen as an essential tool in a number of allied professions.…