Item-based Analysis Research Articles

Development and validation of a blended learning perception scale for higher vocational students

Blended learning, a pedagogical approach that seamlessly integrates online and offline teaching methods, has evolved into a pivotal component of higher education. In order to assess students’ perspectives on their experiences with blended learning in higher vocational schools, we developed a comprehensive tool known as the Blended Learning Perception Scale (BLPS). The scale’s reliability and validity have been rigorously substantiated through data obtained from 600 students enrolled in a vocational school in China. The creation of this scale primarily entailed the application of quantitative methodologies, including both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The final scale encompasses 24 items, categorizing student perceptions into five distinct factors: content coherence, interaction effectiveness, platform functionality, learning motivation, and learning satisfaction. Collectively, these factors elucidate 68.346% of the total variance. Moreover, the Cronbach’s coefficients (α) for these factors range from 0.791 to 0.842, denoting a high degree of internal consistency and thereby establishing the scale’s reliability. Item-based analysis further substantiates the scale’s reliability and discriminability, while confirmatory factor analysis unequivocally confirms its structural validity. Each factor’s average variance extracted (AVE) ranges from 0.589 to 0.671, with a cumulative value of 2.766. Additionally, the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RSMEA) recorded at 0.053 underscores the scale’s satisfactory level of structural validity. In essence, this study presents a valid and dependable instrument for gauging students’ perceptions of blended learning, thoughtfully tailored to the specific attributes of higher vocational education and its students. Furthermore, it offers insights into areas that necessitate further enhancement within blended learning programs.

Shared Decision Making for Choosing renAl Replacement Therapy in Chronic Kidney Disease Patients (SDM-ART trial): study protocol for randomized clinical trial.

Patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) should be educated about their condition so that they can initiate dialysis at the optimal time and make an informed choice between dialysis modalities. Shared decision-making (SDM) empowers patients to select their own treatment and improves patient outcomes. This study aimed to evaluate whether SDM affects the choice of renal replacement therapy among CKD patients. This is a multicenter, open-label, randomized, pragmatic clinical trial. A total of 1,194 participants with CKD who are considering renal replacement therapy were enrolled. The participants will be randomized into three groups in a 1:1:1 ratio: the conventional group, extensive informed decision-making group, and SDM group. Participants will be educated twice at months 0 and 2. Videos and leaflets will be provided to all patients. Patients in the conventional group will receive 5 minutes of education at each visit. The extensive informed decision-making group will receive more informed and detailed education using intensive learning materials for 10 minutes each visit. Patients in the SDM group will be educated for 10 minutes each visit according to illness perception and item-based analysis. The primary endpoint is the ratio of hemodialysis to peritoneal dialysis and kidney transplantation among the groups. Secondary outcomes include unplanned dialysis, economic efficiency, patient satisfaction, patient evaluation of the process, and patient adherence. The SDM-ART is an ongoing clinical study to investigate the effect of SDM on the choice of renal replacement therapy in patients with CKD.

Item-Based Analysis of Some ADOS-2 Items with Typically Developing Participants Might help Improve Cross-Cultural Validity of ADOS-2.

Most internationally recognized instruments for the screening and diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder have been developed in the USA, which calls into question the degree of their cultural adaptation to diverse populations. The aim of this study is to examine the characteristics of social communication in typically developing Croatian-speaking participants (N = 220) using ADOS-2-defined item-level normative values. Croatian subjects showed the expected ("typical") results in the domain of verbal communication, slightly atpical results in nonverbal communication (primarily gesture use), and more significant deviations in pragmatics (offering and asking for information), relative to the expectations of the ADOS-2. As ADOS-2 has become an important component of thorough ASD diagnostic evaluations worldwide, identifying methods for increasing the cross-cultural validity is essential.

Information literacy self-efficacy of scientists working at the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research

Introduction. This study reports the results of a cross-sectional survey to assess the information literacy self-efficacy of scientists working at the Pakistan Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Lahore, Pakistan. Method. A survey questionnaire containing information literacy self-efficacy scale and some demographic variables was personally administered to all the scientists at e Council. The response rate was 86.42%. Analysis. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were applied for data analysis using SPSS. Results. The results indicated that the scientists assessed themselves as ‘often true’ for overall information literacy self-efficacy scale and its sub-dimensions. However, item-based analysis revealed that these scientists were less comfortable in utilizing advanced level information literacy skills. In addition, the age, sex, academic qualification, research experience, number of research publications, and instruction received appeared to be the predictor of self-efficacy. Conclusions. Since the scientists were less competent in advanced level information literacy skills, efforts should be focused on improving their self-efficacy. There is a critical need for user-centered instruction programmes for in-service staff as well as for future scientists. This study would make a worthy contribution to the existing research on workplace information literacy as no such study was found addressing the context of working scientists.

An Item-Based Analysis of PTSD Emotional Numbing Symptoms in Disaster-Exposed Children and Adolescents.

This study was designed to investigate the roles of numbing of positive and negative emotions in PTSD symptomology and related functional impairments. 14,465 Chinese children and adolescents who personally experienced the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake (in Sichuan province, China) took part in the study. Emotional numbing and other PTSD symptoms were assessed by the University of California-Los Angeles PTSD Reaction Index for Children. Functional impairment was measured by the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory 4.0 Generic Core Scales. Item response theory (IRT) analysis showed that both numbing of positive and negative emotions demonstrated acceptable item response characteristics; numbing of positive emotions had better discrimination. Group comparisons revealed that participants who reported numbing of both positive and negative emotions had the highest risk of developing PTSD, most severe PTSD symptoms and functional impairments, with large effect sizes when compared with participants with no emotional numbing symptoms. Reporting only numbing of positive emotions had moderate effects, and reporting only numbing of negative emotions had smaller effects. The results revealed associations between emotional numbing patterns, posttraumatic stress symptoms and impairments in quality of life, and suggests that additional research is needed to explore generalized emotional numbing in children and adolescents in future PTSD research.

Lower verbalizability of visual stimuli modulates differences in estimates of working memory capacity between children with and without developmental language disorders.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often perform below their typically developing peers on verbal memory tasks. However, the picture is less clear on visual memory tasks. Research has generally shown that visual memory can be facilitated by verbal representations, but few studies have been conducted using visual materials that are not easy to verbalize. Therefore, we attempted to construct non-verbalizable stimuli to investigate the impact of working memory capacity. We manipulated verbalizability in visual span tasks and tested whether minimizing verbalizability could help reduce visual recall performance differences across children with and without developmental language disorder. Visuals that could be easily verbalized or not were selected based on a pretest with non-developmental language disorder young adults. We tested groups of children with developmental language disorder (N = 23) and their typically developing peers (N = 65) using these high and low verbalizable classes of visual stimuli. The memory span of the children with developmental language disorder varied across the different stimulus conditions, but critically, although their storage capacity for visual information was virtually unimpaired, the children with developmental language disorder still had difficulty in recalling verbalizable images with simple drawings. Also, recalling complex (galaxy) images with low verbalizability proved difficult in both groups of children. An item-based analysis on correctly recalled items showed that higher levels of verbalizability enhanced visual recall in the typically developing children to a greater extent than the children with developmental language disorder.Conclusions and clinical implication: We suggest that visual short-term memory in typically developing children might be mediated with verbal encoding to a larger extent than in children with developmental language disorder, thus leading to poorer performance on visual capacity tasks. Our findings cast doubts on the idea that short-term storage impairments are limited to the verbal domain, but they also challenge the idea that visual tasks are essentially visual. Therefore, our findings suggest to clinicians working with children experiencing developmental language difficulties that visual memory deficits may not necessarily be due to reduced non-verbal skills but may be due to the high amount of verbal cues in visual stimuli, from which they do not benefit in comparison to their peers.

Item-based analysis of the effects of duloxetine in depression: a patient-level post hoc study

Oft-cited trial-level meta-analyses casting doubt on the usefulness of antidepressants have been based on re-analyses of to what extent the active drug has outperformed placebo in reducing the sum score of the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDRS-17-sum) in clinical trials. Recent studies, however, suggest patient-level analyses of individual HDRS items to be more informative when assessing the efficacy of an antidepressant. To shed further light on both symptom-reducing and symptom-aggravating effects of a serotonin and noradrenaline reuptake inhibitor, duloxetine, when used for major depression in adults, we hence applied this approach to re-analyse data from 13 placebo-controlled trials. In addition, using patient-level data from 28 placebo-controlled trials of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), the response profile of duloxetine was compared to that of these drugs. Duloxetine induced a robust reduction in depressed mood that was not dependent on baseline severity and not caused by side-effects breaking the blind. A beneficial effect on depressed mood was at hand already after one week; when outcome was assessed using HDRS-17-sum as effect parameter, this early response was however masked by a concomitant deterioration with respect to adverse event-related items. No support for a suicide-provoking effect of duloxetine was obtained. The response profile of duloxetine was strikingly similar to that of the SSRIs. We conclude that the use of HDRS-17-sum as effect parameter underestimates the true efficacy and masks an early effect of duloxetine on core symptoms of depression. No support for major differences between duloxetine and SSRIs in clinical profile were obtained.

Testing Measurement Invariance of Academic Self-Efficacy Scale for Singapore, Spain and Turkey

A scale that does not measure the same structure in different cultures should not be used in the cross-cultural comparison-based studies. The validity of the scales should be tested primarily for the countries. In this study, as the evidence of validity of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2015 science self-efficacy scale, the measurement invariance has been tested for different cultures. As determined in scientific studies, general self-efficacy is focused on more and this should be examined in academic self-efficacy known to be to student learning and achievement. In the analysis of the data, the measurement model is initially tested. Then, the measurement invariance is tested with a series of analysis. As a result, the scale confirms a unidimensional structure for each country. However, it has provided partial measurement invariance. This indicates that item-based analysis should be conducted.

Undergraduate medical students need more training in craniomaxillofacial surgery: a comparative study between medical and dental students.

Purpose:To compare the performance in oral, craniomaxillofacial, and facial plastic surgery (CMF)-specific surgical skills between medical students (MS) and dental students (DS) and hence adjust the current CMF training to student-specific needs. The investigators hypothesized that there would be no performance differences between MS and DS.Methods:The investigators implemented a comparative retrospective item-based analysis of student performance in a CMF-specific objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) from 2008 to 2015. The sample was composed of 1010 MS and 225 DS who completed a standardized CMF training and OSCE. Three OSCE scenarios [management mandible fracture (MMF), management zygomatic fracture (MZF), and structured facial examination (SFE)] were included in the study because learning objectives were equal. Descriptive and bivariate statistics were computed and the p value was set at 0.05.Results:In all of the analyzed OSCE scenarios, DS significantly outperformed MS (MMF p<0.001; MZF p=0.013; SFE p<0.001). DS especially appeared to be better in the correct interpretation of radiological findings (five of seven items, MMF) and the correct allocation of anatomical structures (four of five items, MZF) as well as the symptom-oriented examination of the eye (three of three items, SFE).Discussion and conclusion:DS overall seem to be perform better in typical CMF skills. The reasons for this performance gap could be a more profound knowledge of the facial anatomy as well as a higher awareness for CMF as a related specialty to dentistry. CMF should be included in medical curricula in a larger scale, and possible career paths should be highlighted to MS and DS to raise attraction for the specialty. Further studies should focus on the implementation of modern teaching methods in CMF education.

Pre-service middle school mathematics teachers’ evaluations of discussions: the case of proof by contradiction

The purposes of this study are to investigate whether pre-service middle school mathematics teachers evaluate discussions in the cases regarding proof by contradiction correctly, to what extent they explain their correct evaluations by referring to proof by contradiction, and the reasons of their misinterpretations of discussions in the cases regarding proof by contradiction. Data were collected from pre-service middle school mathematics teachers enrolled in a state university in Ankara, Turkey, by asking them to evaluate discussions in two cases related to proof by contradiction. In data analysis, descriptive statistics and item-based analysis were employed. The results of the study indicated that pre-service middle school mathematics teachers are successful in evaluating discussions in the cases regarding proof by contradiction. In terms of year level, it was found that the percentage of the second year students’ correct answers was the lowest in both cases. Moreover, the first year students were the most successful group in the first case, and the third year students were the most successful group in the second case. Nearly half of the students explained their correct answers by referring to proof by contradiction in the first case while the percentage of students who explained their correct answers by mentioning proof by contradiction in the second case was considerably low. When incorrect answers of pre-service middle school mathematics teachers were analyzed, two reasons of their misinterpretations of discussions were emerged as “misunderstanding of the assumption” and “perceiving proof as unnecessary”.

How Culture Shapes the Reading of Fairy Tales: A Cross-Cultural Approach

Abstract A large body of research consistently found cultural differences in cognition between Westerners and East Asians. We undertook a study to explore whether culture-specific thinking models may influence how German and Chinese children understand fairy tales. By transferring the established theoretical framework of individualism versus collectivism from cultural psychology to literary studies, we hypothesize that readers in western Europe prefer an individualistic-oriented thinking model for character evaluation, adventurous attitude to plot development, as well as concrete time and spatial perception; by contrast, their counterparts in East Asia use social-oriented interpretation styles for character judgment, a self-restrained attitude towards plot development, and a symbolic time and spatial imagination. The method we used relies on questionnaires, item-based analysis and factor analysis to learn about the most salient dimensions for cross-cultural story comprehension. We found differences in all three dimensions of story comprehension, namely character evaluation, plot development, and time/space imagination. The results reveal how culture shapes the way we read and point to the important role of embedded schematic knowledge for story comprehension.

Recodificación Fonológica y Formación de Representaciones Ortográficas en Español

The study aimed to explore whether phonological recoding can be considered a self-teaching mechanism of the orthographic representations of Spanish words. Through intentional sampling, 46 3rd graders from a Buenos Aires school participated in an experimental study. Children had to read short stories which included target pseudowords. These pseudowords contained one phoneme that can be represented by more than one grapheme in the Spanish orthographic system (/b/ as or ). Two days after reading the stories children were post-tested in order to explore whether orthographic learning had taken place. Descriptive statistics and means comparisons (Wilcoxon and Friedman tests) were calculated. General results supported the hypothesis of phonological recoding as a selfteaching mechanism. However, an item-based analysis showed that, in those cases in which the pseudoword included a non-dominant grapheme substantially less frequent than the dominant version (/s/ as or ), reading was not enough to form an orthographic representation.

Item-based analysis of delayed reward discounting decision making

Delayed reward discounting (DRD) is a behavioral economic index of time preference, referring to how much an individual devalues a reward based on its delay in time, and has been linked to a wide array of health behaviors. It is commonly assessed using a task that asks participants to make dichotomous choices between two monetary rewards, one available immediately and the other after a delay. This study sought to shorten an extended iterative DRD assessment to increase its versatility and efficiency. Data were drawn from two young adult samples, an exploratory sample (N=130) and a confirmatory sample (N=247). In the exploratory sample, eight items were identified as predicting the majority of the variance in the full task area under the curve (AUC) (R2=.821; p<.001). In the confirmatory sample, the same eight items similarly predicted the majority of variance in the full task AUC (R2=.844, p<.001). These results provide initial support for the validity of a brief 8-item assessment of DRD. Priorities for further validation and potential applications are discussed.

New rule use drives the relation between working memory capacity and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices.

The correlation between individual differences in working memory capacity and performance on the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) is well documented yet poorly understood. The present work proposes a new explanation: that the need to use a new combination of rules on RAPM problems drives the relation between performance and working memory capacity scores. Evidence for this account is supported by an item-based analysis of performance during standard administration of the RAPM and an experiment that manipulates the need to use new rule combinations across 2 subsets of RAPM items. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved).

The analysis of intuition: Processing fluency and affect in judgements of semantic coherence

In semantic coherence judgements individuals are able to intuitively discriminate whether a word triad has a common remote associate (coherent) or not (incoherent) without consciously retrieving the common associate. A processing-fluency account for these intuitions is proposed, which assumes that (a) coherent triads are processed more fluently than incoherent triads, (b) this high fluency triggers a subtle positive affect, and (c) this affect may be experienced as a cognitive feeling and used in explicit judgement. In line with this account, it was shown that coherent triads (a) are processed faster than incoherent triads (Study 1), (b) serve as positive affective primes (Study 2), and (c) are liked more than incoherent triads (Study 3). When participants were provided with an irrelevant source of their affective reactions, they lost the ability to intuitively discriminate between coherent and incoherent triads (Study 4). Finally, an item-based analysis found that triads that are processed faster are liked more and are more likely to be judged coherent, irrespective of their actual coherence (Study 5).

Psychometric item evaluations of the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for athletes

Objectives Using an item-based analysis, the factor structure of the Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes (RESTQ-Sport) [Kellmann, M., & Kallus, K.W. (2001). Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes: User manual. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics] was assessed as a test of its validity. The RESTQ-Sport is a 76-item questionnaire that was developed to assess the physical and mental impact of training stress and to facilitate the formulation of strategies for the enhancement of recovery. According to [Kellmann, M., & Kallus, K.W. (2001). Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes: User manual. Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics], two factors: Recovery and Stress, comprised the 12 General subscales and seven Sport subscales of the RESTQ-Sport. Methods A total of 585 male and female athletes who train at a Canadian national sport center were recruited to complete the RESTQ-Sport. Maximum likelihood factor analyses were performed. Results The results confirmed the two-factor structure proposed by Kellmann and Kallus for the Sport-Recovery/Stress Scale but disconfirmed this structure for the General-Recovery/Stress Scale. Item analysis further disconfirmed the two-factor structure for the General Scale and failed to confirm the 19 Subscales proposed by the authors on both of the General and Sport Scales. Conclusions These results are interpreted to suggest that while the questionnaire should not be considered to be a diagnostic tool for under-recovery states, the RESTQ-Sport does, nonetheless, still measure general parameters of training stress which can be tracked in recovery planning.

Mathematics textbooks, opportunity to learn and student achievement

Opportunity to learn is considered an important contributing factor in learning outcomes. In some of the latest international comparative studies of mathematics achievement, such as SIMS and TIMSS, painstaking efforts have been made to find out what the participating students' opportunities to learn mathematics had been. However, there have been problems with relating the findings to student outcomes. This article approaches opportunity to learn in three different ways. Among these approaches, an item-based analysis of textbook contents resulted in fairly high correlations with student performance at the item level in TIMSS 1999. This implies that even a quite simple analysis of textbooks can produce valuable information when looking for explanations for student achievement in mathematics.

Inhibitory effects of first syllable-frequency in lexical decision: an event-related potential study

Electrophysiological correlates of the behaviorally well-documented inhibitory effect of first syllable-frequency during lexical access are presented. In a lexical decision task, response times to words with high-frequency first syllables were longer than those to words with low-frequency first syllables and resulted in more negative event-related potentials (ERPs) in an early time window from 190 ms to 280 ms and in the N400 component. The onset of the observed first syllable-frequency effect was prior to the onset of the effect of lexicality (i.e., the first reliable differentiation in ERP waveforms in response to words and pseudowords, a potential marker of lexical access). The present study's results support Barber et al.'s [Neuroreport 15 (2004) 545] notion of the prelexical nature of the first syllable-frequency effect by (A) providing evidence for electrophysiological correlates of first syllable-frequency in another, non-Romance orthography (i.e., German), (B) relating the onset of the first syllable-frequency effect to the onset of the lexicality effect and (C) strengthening this pattern of results by means of a novel item-based analysis of ERP data. Implications of the prelexical nature of the inhibitory first syllable-frequency effect for computational models of reading, specifically for Ans et al.'s [Psychol. Rev. 105 (1998) 678] multiple-trace memory (MTM) model of reading are discussed.

Associating object names with descriptions of shape that distinguish possible from impossible objects

Five experiments examine the proposal that object names are closely linked to representations of global, 3D shape by comparing memory for simple line drawings of structurally possible and impossible novel objects. Objects were rendered impossible through local edge violations to global coherence (cf. Schacter, Cooper, & Delaney, 1990) and supplementary observations confirmed that the sets of possible and impossible objects were matched for their distinctiveness. Employing a test of explicit recognition memory, Experiment 1 confirmed that the possible and impossible objects were equally memorable. Experiments 2–4 demonstrated that adults learn names (single-syllable non-words presented as count nouns, e.g., “This is a dax”) for possible objects more easily than for impossible objects, and an item-based analysis showed that this effect was unrelated to either the memorability or the distinctiveness of the individual objects. Experiment 3 indicated that the effects of object possibility on name learning were long term (spanning at least 2 months), implying that the cognitive processes being revealed can support the learning of object names in everyday life. Experiment 5 demonstrated that hearing someone else name an object at presentation improves recognition memory for possible objects, but not for impossible objects. Taken together, the results indicate that object names are closely linked to the descriptions of global, 3D shape that can be derived for structurally possible objects but not for structurally impossible objects. In addition, the results challenge the view that object decision and explicit recognition necessarily draw on separate memory systems, with only the former being supported by these descriptions of global object shape. It seems that recognition also can be supported by these descriptions, provided the original encoding conditions encourage their derivation. Hearing an object named at encoding appears to be just such a condition. These observations are discussed in relation to the effects of naming in other visual tasks, and to the role of visual attention in object identification.