In this study, it was aimed to find out the characteristics of inspiring teachers who inspired teacher candidates to do teaching profession properly. In the study, “An Exploratory Sequential Design” a mixed method where qualitative and quantitative approaches are used concomitantly, was employed to determine the inspiring teacher characteristics. In this design, two steps were respectively followed by the researcher. In the first step grounded theory research design as a qualitative research design was used and in the second step survey research model as a quantitative research design was used. Inspiring Teacher Scale (ITS) was developed by the researchers to collect the data. In the second phase, the study group was extended to continue the quantitative studies. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used first to analyze the data. The results of analysis have demonstrated that the items loaded on four factors, which reflect inspiring teacher characteristics as “teacher communication”, “personal characteristics”, “professional development” and “supporting students in different ways”. Findings suggest that ITS, which has four-factor structures with 36 items, can be suggested as a valid and reliable instrument to determine the characteristics of inspiring teacher. Therefore, in this study the characteristics inspiring teachers were specified according to opinions of teacher candidates and presented to be o model for teacher candidates.

Positive attitude towards statistics is a desirable aspect in developing statistical thinking and understanding statistical concept. The attitude towards statistics instrument in previous study on rural school students lacked evidence in the validity analysis. Therefore, there is a need to provide a valid instrument that can assess rural secondary school students’ attitude toward statistics. For this purpose, this study was carried out to investigate the validity and reliability analysis of the Survey Attitude towards Statistics (SATS-36) instrument from a sample of rural secondary school students. The SATS-36 is a 7-point Likert type scale questionnaire, used to measure students’ attitude towards statistics. The SATS-36 instrument was distributed to 217 Tenth grade science stream students from a rural district in Sabah, Malaysia, which comprised of 66 (30.4%) boys and 151 (69.6%) girls. A second order Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was carried out to analyze the validity of the SATS-36 instrument as well as to confirm the 6-factor model of SATS-36. The reliability of SATS-36 instrument was assessed through the Cronbach’s Alpha value. Overall, the analysis showed that the SATS-36 instrument shows favorable indices for both its validity and reliability. Thus, it can be concluded that the SATS-36 was a valid and reliable instrument for measuring students’ attitude towards statistics among rural science stream secondary school students.

A new index of item discrimination power (IDP), dimension-corrected Somers’ D (D2) is proposed. Somers’ D is one of the superior alternatives for item–total- (Rit) and item–rest correlation (Rir) in reflecting the real IDP with items with scales 0/1 and 0/1/2, that is, up to three categories. D also reaches the extreme value +1 and ‒1 correctly while Rit and Rir cannot reach the ultimate values in the real-life testing settings. However, when the item has four categories or more, Somers’ D underestimates IDP more than Pearson correlation. A simple correction to Somers’ D in the polytomous case seems to lead to be effective in item analysis settings.  In the simulation with real-life items, D2 showed very few cases of obvious underestimation and practically no cases of obvious overestimation. With certain restrictions discussed in the article, D2 seems to be a good alternative for these classic estimators not only with dichotomous items but also with the polytomous ones. In general, the magnitudes of the estimates by D2 are higher than those by Rit, Rir, and polychoric correlation and they seem to be close of those of bi- and polyserial correlation coefficients without out-of-range values.

Purpose in life is a key construct in the development of young adults, particularly college students. There are many instruments measuring sense of purpose in life, but few studies have examined their measurement properties among college students. The current study compares the measurement invariance properties of the Purpose in Life (PIL) scale and the Claremont Purpose Scale (CPS) across college year and undergraduate school. Using both a unidimensional and a two-dimensional model, we found that the PIL’s interpretability is limited among college students. Using a three-dimensional model, the CPS was invariant with respect to both grouping variables. The study suggests that the CPS can be used to make meaningful comparisons among college students categorized by school year and undergraduate school. The study also has some implications about the construct of purpose in life; namely, scale structures that work well statistically and theoretically among adults might not generalize to young adults.

This research’s aim was to explore the role of cognitive flexibility in mediating the effect of intrinsic motivation on the creativity of junior high school students. A creativity scale, an intrinsic motivation inventory and a cognitive flexibility inventory were utilized to investigate a sample of junior high school students in Shaanxi Province in western China. 765 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed using the structural equation model (SEM). The SEM analysis showed that intrinsic motivation and cognitive flexibility have significantly positive impacts on junior high school students’ creativity. Furthermore, a full model revealed that cognitive alternatives and cognitive control mediate the relationship intrinsic motivation and creativity, and the mediation effect of cognitive alternatives is significantly greater than that of cognitive control. In general, the current research suggests that the impact of intrinsic motivation on junior high school students’ creativity is mediated by cognitive flexibility, and its results amplify prior scholars’ research results and give educators an inspiration how to cultivate creativity for the middle school students.

There are different strategies to analyze teacher and student performance when they interact with each other in class. The most used strategies are direct observation and verbal reports. Even though what is observed or reported depends on theoretical frameworks regarding didactic interactions, these must be related to teacher functions such as supervision, providing feedback, and evaluation of student performance. In this study, instruments for observational recording and verbal reports were developed and validated considering teacher functions and their student performance counterparts to compare the degree of correspondence or divergence between data gathered from both strategies. 135 students enrolled in a science class and their teachers participated. The class was taught in a public high school located in center/south Mexico. Classes were videotaped and the corresponding observational records were analyzed. Two months later, verbal reports were administered to students and teachers. Coincidences and differences that were found revealed that observer-observe interaction is conditioned by social norms. These results were interpreted considering the notion of silence as a communicative element.

The field of studies in metacognition points to some limitations in the way the construct has traditionally been measured and shows a near absence of performance-based tests. The Meta-Text is a performance-based test recently created to assess components of cognition regulation: planning, monitoring, and judgment. This study presents the first evidence on the structural validity of the Meta-Text, by analyzing its dimensionality and reliability in a sample of 655 Honduran university students. Different models were tested, via item confirmatory factor analysis. The results indicated that the specific factors of planning and monitoring do not hold empirically. The bifactor model containing the general cognition regulation factor and the judgment-specific factor was evaluated as the best model (CFI = .992; NFI = .963; TLI = .991; RMSEA = .021). The reliability of the factors in this model proved to be acceptable (Ω = .701 & .699). The judgment items were well loaded only by the judgment factor, suggesting that the judgment construct may actually be another component of the metacognitive knowledge dimension but having little role in cognition regulation. The results show initial evidence on the structural validity of the Meta-Text and give rise to information previously unidentified by the field which has conceptual implications for theorizing metacognitive components.

The purposes of this research are (a) to make an instrument to measure the achievement of project-based digitalpreneurship learning in students; (b) to describe the quality of the project-based digitalpreneurship learning achievement assessment instrument for vocational high school students; (c) to measure the competence and skills. This study employed to research and development as its methodology, using a combination procedure between Oriondo and Antonio and, Mardapi. The development procedure includes three stages: instrument design, instrument testing, and measurement. A total of 795 students who participated in the study at 5 vocational high schools in Yogyakarta's special region served as responders. Data analysis in this development uses the content validity of the formula Aiken V Index, confirmatory factor analysis establishes the construct's validity, and construct reliability. Measurement instrument development. Research findings that (a) the instrument is ready to be used in the measurement; (b) the quality of the project-based digitalpreneruship learning achievement assessment instrument for vocational high school students is well tested. This is evidenced by the validity test which has a high score >.8; The proof of construct validity in this study using CFA > .5; GOF chi-square value with a critical value of df = 289, X2 = 323, p-value with a critical value of .079, RMSEA with a critical value of RMSEA .019 (≤ .08), SMRM with a critical value of SRMR 0.030 (≤ .05), CFI with a critical value of CFI .990 (> .97), and an NFI with a critical value of NFI .989 ( > .90); (c) the measurement results are identified in the process that needs to be improved again regarding the digitalpreneurship skills of vocational high school students.

Researchers have recognized the need for updates of test anxiety scales for more measurement accuracy. However, studies that investigated the measurement invariance of the Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI), and identified the latent profiles remain scare not withstanding its wide usage in Nigeria. This might have an impact on how generalizability and reliance on outcomes from such an instrument are handled. We investigated the measurement invariance of TAI and the latent profiles among Nigerian adolescents. Gender constituted our focus in the measurement invariance given its significance in test anxiety research. Adolescent students (n=539) formed the sample of our study. We employed the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the latent profile analysis (LPA) to measure the invariance and identify the class profiles. We found evidence of a measurement invariance across gender in both competing models given that we obtained strict measurement invariance. We also identified a four-class profile model for both male and female students: low (17.50%; 19.00%), moderate (17.50%; 34.40%), high (36.80 %; 32.80%), and very high (12.60%; 13.80%) test anxiety profiles respectively. We concluded that while the composed factors are equivalently scaled across gender that test anxious students were not monolithic given the identified profiles.

Social identity is an important social determinant of student outcomes such as mental health and well-being. Currently, no validated social identity measures exist for adolescents in secondary school settings. A new ‘Adolescent Social Identity’ measure was developed by adapting two social identity dimensions from a validated reputation enhancement scale. The Social Identity Measure comprises two scales of 10 items each to measure how adolescents think their peers view them (e.g., reputational status) in terms of their conforming and nonconforming behaviour (Self-perception of Public Self) and how adolescents would ideally like to be viewed (Ideal Public Self) by peers. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted along with assessments of reliability, validity, and measurement invariance. Conforming and Nonconforming subscales for both scales were shown to be reliable, valid, and invariant across age and gender groupings. There were significant but small differences in the latent means for gender.

The objective of this study was to develop a measure that possesses both reliability and validity in order to evaluate innovative thinking within the realm of education. To achieve this, the instrument's validity and reliability were evaluated through quantitative methods in two distinct phases. A team of educational experts conducted the process of establishing content validity and ensuring that the items on the instrument accurately reflected the intended constructs of creative thinking. Following that, the assessment of concept validity was conducted using confirmatory factor analyses. The aforementioned investigations resulted in the discovery of a five-factor solution consisting of 25 elements, all of which demonstrated scores beyond the crucial threshold. This successful outcome confirmed the presence of distinct factors representing different dimensions of innovative thinking. The study enrolled 1250 students from vocational education institutions as participants. The data obtained from the participants was subjected to principal component analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, leading to the development of a model that exhibited a good match with the empirical data. This indicated the effectiveness of the developed instrument in measuring innovative thinking capacity. In conclusion, the research effectively developed an accurate and dependable tool for evaluating innovative thinking in the realm of education. The gathering of positive data from the participants and meticulous quantitative analyses were responsible for this.