Disengaged responding poses a severe threat to the validity of educational large-scale assessments, because item responses from unmotivated test-takers do not reflect their actual ability. Existing identification approaches rely primarily on item response times, which bears the risk of misclassifying fast engaged or slow disengaged responses.…

As researchers in the social sciences, we are often interested in studying not directly observable constructs through assessments and questionnaires. But even in a well-designed and well-implemented study, rapid-guessing behavior may occur. Under rapid-guessing behavior, a task is skimmed shortly but not read and engaged with in-depth. Hence, a…

Performance assessments heavily rely on human ratings. These ratings are typically subject to various forms of error and bias, threatening the assessment outcomes' validity and fairness. Differential rater functioning (DRF) is a special kind of threat to fairness manifesting itself in unwanted interactions between raters and performance- or…

The effects of different response option orders on survey responses have been studied extensively. The typical research design involves examining the differences in response characteristics between conditions with the same item stems and response option orders that differ in valence--either incrementally arranged (e.g., strongly disagree to…

Paper-based visual analogue scale (VAS) items were developed 100 years ago. Although they gained great popularity in clinical and medical research for assessing pain, they have been scarcely applied in other areas of psychological research for several decades. However, since the beginning of digitization, VAS have attracted growing interest among…

The hierarchical model of van der Linden is the most popular model for responses and response times in tests. It is composed of two separate submodels--one for the responses and one for the response times--that are joined at a higher level. The submodel for the response times is based on the lognormal distribution. The lognormal distribution is a…

To measure the response style of acquiescence, researchers recommend the use of at least 15 items with heterogeneous content. Such an approach is consistent with its theoretical definition and is a substantial improvement over traditional methods. Nevertheless, measurement of acquiescence can be enhanced by two additional considerations: first, to…

Previous research has found the effects of acquiescence to be generally consistent across item "aggregates" within a single survey (i.e., essential tau-equivalence), but it is unknown whether this phenomenon is consistent at the" individual item" level. This article evaluated the often assumed but inadequately tested…

This article is concerned with developing a measure of general academic ability (GAA) for high school graduates who apply to colleges, as well as with the identification of optimal weights of the GAA indicators in a linear combination that yields a composite score with maximal reliability and maximal predictive validity, employing the framework of…

Response styles, the tendency to respond to Likert-type items irrespective of content, are a widely known threat to the reliability and validity of self-report measures. However, it is still debated how to measure and control for response styles such as extreme responding. Recently, multiprocess item response theory models have been proposed that…

In the social sciences, latent traits often have a hierarchical structure, and data can be sampled from multiple levels. Both hierarchical latent traits and multilevel data can occur simultaneously. In this study, we developed a general class of item response theory models to accommodate both hierarchical latent traits and multilevel data. The…

Estimation problems associated with the correlated-trait correlated-method (CTCM) parameterization of a multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) matrix are widely documented: the model often fails to converge; even when convergence is achieved, one or more of the parameter estimates are outside the admissible parameter space. In this study, the authors…

Hope is a motivational/cognitive attribute that is theoretically necessary to initiate and sustain action toward goal attainment. The Herth Hope Scale (HHS) not only appears to tap into some of the same Agency and Pathways content of the commonly used Adult Hope Scale developed by Snyder et al. but also contains some more spiritual and social…

The authors investigated the factor structure of the Schutte Self-Report Emotional Intelligence (SSREI) scale on international students. Via confirmatory factor analysis, the authors tested the fit of the models reported by Schutte et al. and five other studies to data from 640 international students in the United States. Results show that…

The Revised Two-Factor Study Process Questionnaire (R-SPQ-2F) is a measure of university students' approach to learning. Original evaluation of the scale's psychometric properties was based on a sample of Hong Kong university students' scores. The purpose of this study was to test and cross-validate the R-SPQ-2F factor structure, based on separate…