<p> Contemporary organizational leadership scholars classify the ancient, persisting need to find one's true self as the study of authentic leadership. Authentic leadership scholarship is still very much in its infancy. There have been many calls by leading researchers to study it further in both qualitative and quantitative realms (Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, &amp; Peterson, 2008). The current study explores authentic leadership factors qualitatively, as described by leaders and constituents working in a retail sales-based environment. The qualitative methodology of grounded theory (Strauss &amp; Corbin, 1998) is used in conceptualizing and implementing the research. In-depth interviews we conducted with individuals both in leadership and non-leadership roles. For the purposes of this study the terms "non-leadership role" are operationalized as non-supervisory positions. The data collected for the study center around participants' perceptions of authentic leadership relative to their personal experience within the retail sector. In accordance with grounded theory, these areas are subject to change as the interviews developed. Data was organized in two major themes, relational and instructional, with several sub themes. Data suggested that most behaviors associated with authenticity have to do with self-awareness and that most leaders exhibited a larger sense of awareness, or situational awareness. Further study in this area should be performed to include a more diverse population, detail suggestions are made.</p><p>

<p> <i>Skin tone bias or colorism</i> is &ldquo;the tendency to perceive or behave toward members of a racial category based on the lightness or darkness of their skin tone&rdquo; (Maddox &amp; Gray, 2002, p. 250). It is &ldquo;the prejudicial treatment of individuals falling within the same racial group on the basis of skin color&rdquo; (Thompson &amp; Keith, 2004, p. 46) and &ldquo;the allocation of privilege and disadvantage according to the lightness or darkness of one&rsquo;s skin&rdquo; (Burke &amp; Embrick, 2008, p. 17). Skin tone bias/colorism is a form of discrimination based on skin tone that typically privileges lighter-skinned individuals and penalizes darker-skinned individuals within and across racial and ethnic groups (Hunter, 2007; Jones, 2000). For my study, I focused my investigation of skin tone bias/colorism in relation to Blacks in the United States of America. </p><p> I conducted semi-structured face-to-face individual interviews with 30 Black undergraduate students (15 men and 15 women) at the University of Pennsylvania using purposive sampling. To triangulate data for this study, participants&rsquo; skin color was determined by two self-report assessments: the Skin Color Satisfaction Scale (SCSS) (Bond &amp; Cash, 1992; Falconer &amp; Neville, 2000) and the Skin Color Assessment Procedure (SCAP) (Bond &amp; Cash, 1992; Coard, Breland, &amp; Raskin, 2001). These assessments were administered prior to the interview. </p><p> Contrary to societal myth, Blacks are not a monolithic group. The impetus for my dissertation was to develop a qualitative study that necessitates the acknowledgment of the heterogeneity of Black students&rsquo; backgrounds and experiences with college, to ultimately shed light on the potential challenges faced by varying Black students in college based on skin tone, and to provide recommendations for Black students to effectively navigate highly selective institutions of higher education &ndash; with hopes to increase their persistence and success in college. Recommendations for higher education institutions, faculty, and student affairs administrators to better support Black students are also provided. </p><p> My research questions were as follows: How do the academic, personal, and social experiences of lighter-skinned Black students at a highly selective higher education institution vary compared with the experiences of darker-skinned Black students? How does this variation in experiences between lighter and darker-skinned Black students matter within the higher education context? </p><p>

Background: Due to a change in service delivery, the Educational Psychology Service (EPS) in which the researcher works now has an income-generated target which represents 20% of the full cost of the service. An increasing amount of this traded work is delivered in the form of training. Whilst training is perceived to be an important role of an Educational Psychologist (EP), there is a dearth of published literature about the role of the EP as a trainer. It was therefore felt that it would be useful to establish a more in-depth understanding of the EP’s role as a trainer, its distinctive and valuable contribution and the content and process elements of effective EP training.Participants: Sixteen participants in total took part within the study. This included the Principal Educational Psychologist of a Central England Metropolitan Local Authority, three EPs who delivered three separate training events, the three commissioners of the EP training events, and nine recipients of the EP training events.Methods: The study uses an exploratory single case study design, using a combination of semi-structured interviews and a focus group with additional data from a training observation, documentary analysis of training materials and training evaluation data. The interviews and focus group were analysed using inductive, explicit thematic analysis.Findings: A wide range of themes were identified about the distinct and valued contribution of EPs as trainers. Some of these included: EPs’ psychological knowledge and skills; EPs’ local knowledge of schools and other services; EPs’ wider view of training. Further findings identified the competing demands for Educational Psychology Services in delivering effective training and the commercialisation of EP services within the current financial climate.Conclusions: The exploratory nature of the study allowed for distinct and valued contributions of EPs’ as trainers to be identified. This resulted in a number of implications and recommendations for future practice.

Little is known about how children develop their concepts of the future. However, future time perspective (FTP) is considered important in the development of abilities such as planning, goal setting, and the delay of gratification. FTP has also been related to mental health in adults and academic achievement in adolescents. This study explored FTP, defined as the ability to temporally locate and organize future events, and compared participants' ability to locate and organize the same events with respect to their past occurrences. There were 167 participants from four grade levels with average ages of the groups ranging from 7.4 to 10.5 years of age. Participants located five recurrent events on four timelines representing; a past(day), a past(year), a future(day), and a future(year). Participants also took tests to assess their knowledge of conventional time (i.e., clocks and calendars). Hypotheses were proposed that: (a) participants would show a general developmental improvement on all tasks, (b) participants would perform better on day-scale than year-scale timelines, (c) participants would perform better on past than future timelines, and (d) knowledge of conventional time would be used by older participants to structure year-scale, but not day-scale, timelines. Results supported the first two hypotheses but, contrary to expectations, participants performed better on future than past timelines. The author proposed that location of sequences in the past is more cognitively challenging because it moves counter to the unidirectional flow of time; events that are more distant from the present are earlier in the sequence. Results supported the hypothesis that more sophisticated representations of conventional time are needed for location of events in longer durations, and that such representations are developmentally acquired, but a causal relationship could not be established. Participants relied heavily on event schemas in locating events; these schemas helped participants produce a correct sequence but often with the incorrect start of the sequence given the instructions regarding use of the present as a reference point. Results also suggested that children might have a different concept of the relationship between the present and the past and future than that of adults.

In order to provide effective social, emotional, and behavioral supports to all students, there is a need for formative assessment tools that can help determine the responsiveness of students to intervention. Schoolwide positive behavior support (SWPBS) is one framework that can provide evidence-based intervention within a 3-tiered model to reach students at all levels of risk. This dissertation begins the process of developing a brief, teacher-completed rating scale, intended to be used with students in grades K-8 for the formative assessment of positive classroom behavior. An item pool of 93 positively worded rating scale items was drawn from or adapted from existing rating scales. Teachers (n = 142) rated the importance of each item to their concept of “positive classroom behavior.” This survey yielded 30 positively worded items for inclusion on the pilot rating scale. The pilot scale was used by teachers to rate students in two samples drawn from general education K-8 classrooms: a universal tier group of randomly selected students (n = 80) and a targeted tier group of students with mild to moderate behavior problems (n = 82). Pilot scale ratings were significantly higher in the universal group than the targeted group by about one standard deviation, with no significant group by gender interaction. Strong results were found for the split-half reliability (.94) and the internal consistency (.98) of the pilot scale. All but two items showed medium to large item-total correlations (> .5). Factor analysis indicated a unidimensional factor structure, with 59.87% of the variance accounted for by a single factor, and high item loadings (> .4) from 26 of the 30 factors. The unidimensional factor structure of the rating scale indicates its promise for potential use as a general outcome measure (GOM), with items reflecting a range of social, emotional, and behavioral competencies. Future research is suggested in order to continue development and revision of the rating scale with a larger, more diverse sample, and to begin exploring its suitability for screening and formative assessment purposes.

The current approach to identifying specific reading disability is plagued with problems. The most common diagnostic procedure, called the IQ-achievement discrepancy, involves establishing that a student's reading performance on standardized achievement tests is significantly below what would be expected from his/her IQ. This approach is unreliable with respect to diagnosis and uninformative with respect to prescriptives for remediation. An approach is needed that can provide reliable diagnosis and can indicate the deficient skills that could be targeted for remediation. The purpose of the present research was to evaluate alternatives to the IQ-reading discrepancy for identifying reading disabled college students. Specifically, the question was whether reading disabled and nondisabled college students could be differentiated using the Computer-based Academic Assessment System (CAAS) and a measure of listening and reading comprehension called the Sentence Verification Technique. College students recruited from Disabled Students Services and nondisabled introductory psychology students at the same college were given SVT tests and elementary-level and adult-level CAAS reading batteries. After all data was collected and prior to data analysis, students in the disabled sample were classified as having a reading disability, generalized learning disability, or other disabilities on the basis of various sources of information. The requirements of a diagnostic technique for identifying reading disability were used as a framework for evaluating SVT and CAAS techniques. Multivariate analyses of variance were used to evaluate each of the techniques alone, and discriminant analyses were used to evaluate the techniques in combination in meeting the following requirements: (1) differentiating disabled from nondisabled students, (2) differentiating reading disabled students from nondisabled students and from students with other disabilities, (3) differentiating among disabled students with different types of problems, and (4) identifying individual patterns of performance that indicate a reading disability. Results suggested that SVT and CAAS techniques were generally able to make the above distinctions with the CAAS technique appearing to be more effective. Reasons for why SVT may have been less successful are provided in the discussion.

Because item response theory (IRT) models are arbitrarily identified, independently estimated parameters must be transformed to a common metric before they can be compared. To accomplish this, the transformation constants must be estimated and because these estimates are imperfect, there is a propagation of error effect when transforming parameter estimates. However, this error propagation is typically ignored and estimates of the transformation constants are treated as true when transforming parameter estimates to a common metric. To address this shortcoming, a procedure is proposed and evaluated that accounts for the uncertainty in the transformation constants when adjusting for differences in metric. This procedure utilizes random draws from model parameter posterior distributions, which are available when IRT models are estimated using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. Given two test forms with model parameter vectors Λ Y and ΛX, the proposed procedure works by sampling the posterior of ΛY and Λ X, estimating the transformation constants using these two samples, and transforming sample X to the scale of sample Y. This process is repeated N times, where N is the desired number of transformed posterior draws. A simulation study is conducted to evaluate the feasibility and success of the proposed strategy compared to the traditional strategy of treated scaling constants estimates as error-free. Results were evaluated by comparing the observed coverage probabilities of the transformed posteriors to their expectation. The proposed strategy yielded equal or superior coverage probabilities compared to the traditional strategy for 140 of the 144 comparisons made in this study (97%). Conditions included four methods of estimated the scaling constants and three anchor lengths.

Understanding the relationship between person, item, and testlet covariates and person, item, and testlet parameters may offer considerable benefits to both test development and test validation efforts. The Bayesian TRT models proposed by Wainer, Bradlow, and Wang (2007) offer a unified structure within which model parameters may be estimated simultaneously with model parameter covariates. This unified approach represents an important advantage of these models: theoretically correct modeling of the relationship between covariates and their respective model parameters. Analogous analyses can be performed via conventional post-hoc regression methods, however, the fully Bayesian framework offers an important advantage over the conventional post-hoc methods by reflecting the uncertainty of the model parameters when estimating their relationship to covariates. The purpose of this study was twofold. First was to conduct a basic simulation study to investigate the accuracy and effectiveness of the Bayesian TRT approach in estimating the relationship of covariates to their respective model parameters. Additionally, the Bayesian TRT results were compared to post-hoc regression results, where the dependent variable was the point estimate of the model parameter of interest. Second, an empirical study applied the Bayesian TRT model to two real data sets: the Step 3 component of the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), and the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) by Tedeschi and Calhoun (1996). The findings of both simulation and empirical studies suggest that the Bayesian TRT performs very similarly to the post-hoc approach. Detailed discussion is provided and potential future studies are suggested in chapter 5.

Many of the measurement models currently used in testing require that the items that make up the test span a unidimensional space. The assumption of unidimensionality is difficult to satisfy in practice since item pools are arguably multidimensional. Among the causes of test multidimensionality are the presence of minor dimensions (such as test motivation, speed of performance and reading ability) beyond the dominant ability the test is supposed to measure. The consequences of violating the assumption of unidimensionality may be serious. Different item selection procedures when used for constructing tests will have unknown and differential effects on the reliability and validity of tests. The purposes of this research were (1) to review research on test dimensionality, (2) to investigate the impact of test dimensionality on the ability estimation and the decision accuracy of criterion-referenced tests, and (3) to examine the effects of interaction of item selection methods with test dimensionality and content categories on ability estimation and decision accuracy of criterion-referenced tests. The empirical research consisted of two parts: in Part A, three item pools with different dimensionality structures were generated for two different tests. Four item selection methods were used to construct tests from each item pool, and the ability estimates and the decision accuracies of the 12 tests were compared in each test. In Part B, real data were used as an item bank, and four item selection methods were used to construct short tests from the item bank. The measurement precision and the decision accuracies of the resulted tests were compared. It was found that the strength of minor dimensions affect the precision of the ability estimation and decision accuracy of mastery tests, and that optimal item selection methods perform better than other item selection methods, especially when test data are not unidimensional. The differences in measurement precision and decision accuracy among data with different degrees of multidimensionality and among the different item selection methods were statistically and practically significant. An important implication of the study results for the practitioners are that the presence of minor dimensions in a test may lead to the misclassification of examinees, and hence limit the usefulness of the test.

Three computer-aided tutoring procedures were devised to teach multicolumn addition according to the standard school algorithm, one procedure to each of three groups of 2nd-grade children. The key differences between groups were the demands placed on short term memory and the amount of conceptual understanding the procedures attempted to teach. Each child solved a sequence of two-digit problems on a computer screen by touching each digit with a light pen in the correct sequence. The control group did not receive on-screen number-fact assistance. One treatment ("assisted") group did receive on-screen number-fact assistance, testing the hypothesis that the algorithm is learned more effectively when learned first as a sequence of procedural steps alone, without subjects' need to recall number-facts. A second treatment ("simulation") group received the same on-screen assistance along with an additional display of simulated blocks which, like concrete manipulative materials, represented symbol manipulations. The simulation group tested a second hypothesis that a concurrent display of the meaning of procedural steps contributes to even more effective algorithmic learning. T-tests (one-tailed, 5% level) applied pair-wise to pretest/posttest difference scores indicated support for the first hypothesis but not for the second, an indication that 2nd-grade children learn the addition algorithm more effectively if demand on short term memory is temporarily lifted. A descriptive framework called "superposition of frames" is proposed to account for anomalies in findings and for the rich diversity of errors generally manifested by children in multidigit addition. Drawing on current concepts in cognitive psychology and mathematics education, this description suggests that children's mathematical knowledge is fragmented into isolated, unstable, and sometimes entrenched frames of knowledge. When a child finds appropriate correspondences between frames and initiates a superposition of frames, the child's procedural and conceptual knowledge, previously in disarray, may then become integrated. Implications for elementary mathematics instruction are discussed.