The recent shift to a culture of competence has permeated several areas of professional psychology, including competency identification, competency-based education training, and competency assessment. A competency framework has also been applied to various programs and specialty areas within psychology, such as clinical, counseling, clinical health, school, cultural diversity, neuro-, gero-, child, and pediatric psychology. Despite the spread of competency focus throughout psychology, few standardized measures of competency assessment have been developed. To the authors' knowledge, only four published studies on measures of competency assessment in psychology currently exist. While these measures demonstrate significant steps in progressing the assessment of confidence, three of these measures were designed for use with individual programs, two of these international (i.e., UK and Taiwan). The current study applied the seminal Competency Benchmarks, via a recently adapted benchmarks form (i.e., Practicum Evaluation form; PEF), to practicum students at the University of North Texas. In addition to traditional supervisor ratings, the present study also involved self-, peer supervisor, and peer supervisee ratings to provide 360-degree evaluations. Item-response theory (IRT) was used to evaluate the psychometric properties of the PEF and inform potential revisions of this form. Supervisor ratings of competency were found to fit the Rasch model specified, lending support to use of the benchmarks framework as assessed by this form. Self- and peer-ratings were significantly correlated with supervisor ratings, indicating that there may be some utility to 360-degree evaluations. Finally, as predicted, foundational competencies were rated as significantly higher than functional competencies, and competencies improved significantly with training. Results of the current study provide clarity about the utility of the PEF and inform our understanding of practicum-level competencies.

The purpose of this study was to determine if using a multistage approach for the empirical selection of anchor items would lead to more accurate DIF detection rates than the anchor selection methods proposed by Kopf, Zeileis, & Strobl (2015b). A simulation study was conducted in which the sample size, percentage of DIF, and balance of DIF were manipulated. The outcomes of interest were true positive rates, false positive rates, familywise false positive rates, anchor contamination rates, and familywise anchor contamination rates. Results showed the proposed multistage methods produced lower anchor contamination rates than the non-multistage methods under some conditions, but there were generally no meaningful differences in true positive and false positive rates.

Inom födosöksteori söker och konsumerar djur föda på ett sätt som maximerar deras förmåga att reproducera sig och få sina gener representerade i kommande generationer. För att åstadkomma detta måste individer ibland anpassa sina beteenden. Brunbjörnhonor (Ursus arctos) med årsungar måste bland annat dela den föda de hittar med ungarna. För att inte riskera att ungarna dödas av hannar så har honor med årsungar under parningsperioden mindre hemområden och rör sig mindre under ett dygn än vuxna honor utan årsungar. Med bakgrund av dessa olikheter undersöks ifall honor med årsungar konsumerar annan föda jämfört med honor i andra reproduktiva kategorier. En spillningsinsamling från GPS-märkta björnar gjordes i västra Hälsingland och norra Dalarna under 2015 från 25:e maj till 11:e oktober. Inför dataanalysen delades säsongen upp i två perioder vid den 15:e juli på grund av olikheter i födotillgång samt att parningssäsongen slutar. En frekvensanalys gjordes av individernas spillningar som resulterade i en icke signifikant skillnad mellan honor med och honor utan årsungars födoval. En undersökande dataanalys av volymprocent antyder dock att det kan finnas skillnader i mängd av vissa födoämnen under parningsperioden. Dessa skillnader fanns i kategorierna ben, älghår samt övriga växtmaterial. Även om studien lider av liten provstorlek med endast fyra honor med årsungar i var och en av de båda perioderna tycks undersökningen originell med en upplösning på individnivå. Tidigare skandinaviska födovalsanalyser hos brunbjörnen har gjorts med spillning som minsta enhet. / According to foraging theory, animals seek and consume food in ways that maximize their ability to reproduce and have their genes represented in future generations. In order to achieve this, individuals must sometimes adapt their behaviors. Females of the brown bear (Ursus arctos) with cubs of the year must share the food they find with their cubs. To protect the cubs from being killed by males in the mating period, females with young have smaller home ranges than other adult females and move less on a daily basis than other females. In view of these differences my hypothesis is that females with yearlings consume different food items than other females. A fecal collection from GPS-marked brown bears was made in 2015 in the northern Dalarna county and northwestern county of Gävleborg in Sweden from 25 May to 11 October. Prior to the data analysis, the season was divided into two periods, 25 May to 15 July and 16 July to 11 October, based on differences in food availability and season (mating vs non-mating season). A frequency analysis detected no significant differences in food items consumed for either period. However, an exploratory data analysis of percent volume of different food items suggests that there may be differences in the amount of certain foods during the mating period. These differences were found for the food categories, bone, moose hair and other plant material. Although the study suffers from a small sample size with only four females with cubs of the year in each of the two periods, this study is relatively novel with a resolution at the individual level. Previous food item analyzes of the brown bear in Scandinavia have been done with fecal samples as the smallest unit.

In this dissertation we present rule-based machine learning methods for solving problems with high-dimensional or complex datasets. We are applying decision tree methods on blood-based biomarkers and neuropsychological tests to predict Alzheimer’s disease in its early stages. We are also using tree-based methods to identify disparity in dementia related biomarkers among three female ethnic groups. In another part of this research, we tried to use rule-based methods to identify homogeneous subgroups of subjects who share the same risk patterns out of a heterogeneous population. Finally, we applied a network-based method to reduce the dimensionality of a clinical dataset, while capturing the interaction among variables. The results show that the proposed methods are efficient and easy to use in comparison to the current machine learning methods.

The development of a standardized assessment can, in general, be broken into multiple stages. In the first, items to be used in the assessment are generated according to the skills and abilities that are to be assessed and the needs of the developers. These items are then, ideally, tested in the field on members of the population for which the assessment is intended. Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis is used to reveal items in the item pool which are unusable due to measurement error, redundancy in the level of item difficulty, or bias. More potential items may be generated and tested until there is a set of valid items with which the developers can move forward. The present study focused on the steps of item tryout and analysis for the establishment of demonstrable item-level validity. Fifty-one potential test items were analyzed for a version of the Shirts and Shoes Test (Plante & Vance, 2012) for 6-year-olds. A total of 23 items were discarded due to error in one or more of the measures mentioned above, and one item was discarded due to its low difficulty. The remaining 27 items were deemed suitable for the 6-year-old population.

The aim of this thesis is to analyze the process of reorganization under the US laws and accounting standards. The first chapter contains legislation, description of the parties and their role during the insolvency proceedings. It covers the role of the debtor, creditors, creditors' committee, insolvency trustee and insolvency court throughout the insolvency proceedings. The second part focuses on accounting under US GAAP based primarily on the ASC 852, which describes in detail the cases and items that are treated differently during the reorganization. The third part includes legal and accounting analysis of the American paper company NewPage Holdings Inc., which successfully emerged from bancruptcy in 2012.

The paper deals with a justifiability of the application of statistics in the process of test development. It also aims to show possibilities of its application on the final test version. The first part of the thesis brings up the fundamentals of test development theory. The second part aims to describe general impact of statistics application on the test qualities. It further focuses on item analysis as one of the tool to evaluate test items qualities. Among others it includes information about reliability and validity analysis so as about the test equating methods. The analytical part contains analysis conducted on the OSP test. The analytical part also deals with predicted test validity and with the quality level of data gained from pre-testing.

Achievement goal theory is one of the most broadly accepted theoretical paradigms in educational psychology with over 35 years of influencing research and educational practice. The longstanding use of this construct has led to two consequences of importance for this research: 1) many different dimensionality representations have been debated, and 2) methods used to confirm dimensionality of the scales have been supplanted from best practice. A further issue is that goal orientations are used to inform classroom practice, whereas most measurement studies focus on the structure of the personal goal orientation scales rather than the classroom level structure. This study aims to provide an updated understanding of one classroom goal orientation scale using the modern psychometric techniques of multidimensional item response theory and bifactor analysis. The most commonly used scale with K-12 students is the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales (PALS); thus, the PALS classroom goal orientation scales will be the subject of this study.

The thesis deals with accouting rectyfiing items in the comapany DK Open Co. and their influence to the profit. In the thesis is analyzed the fax and accouting rectyfiing items. It is described the system of accounting and creation accounting and tax rectyfiing items. The accounting system and the register of accouting items has been analyzed and proposed the improvements. Major improvement is the internal guidelines for creating rectyfiing items.

The Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Task (ROCFT) has been a standard in neuropsychological assessment for six decades. Many researchers have contributed administration procedures, additional scoring systems and normative data to improve its utility. Despite the abundance of research, the original 36-point scoring system still reigns among clinicians despite documented problems with ceiling and floor effects and poor discrimination between levels of impairment. This study is an attempt to provide a new method based upon item response theory that will allow clinicians to better describe the impairment levels of their patients. Through estimation of item characteristic curves, underlying traits can be estimated while taking into account varying levels of difficulty and discrimination within the set of individual items. The ultimate goal of the current research is identification of a subset of ROCFT items that can be examined in addition to total scores to provide an extra level of information for clinicians, particularly when they are faced with a need to discriminate severely and mildly impaired patients.