Measurement invariance of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale for Students: A study across secondary school pupils and university students

School engagement is a multidimensional construct characterized by vigour, dedication, and absorption towards academic work that is related to school achievement. This study aimed to examine the measurement invariance of a school engagement measure – the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale-Students (UWES-S) – across secondary school pupils and university students. Two samples of secondary school pupils (n = 251) and university students (n = 229) were used. The results supported the original three-factor structure (vigour, dedication and absorption) of the UWES-S instead of a two- or a one-factor structure in both samples. Evidence for the metric and scalar invariance of the measure across secondary school pupils and university students was also found. The university sample had higher scores in vigour and absorption but not in dedication. These findings demonstrate that the UWES-S can be used for developmental studies where school engagement and its relation with other variables needs to be compared across distinct educational levels.     

Two Tracks of Thought: A Structural Model of the Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (TCT-DP)

The Test for Creative Thinking-Drawing Production (TCT-DP, Urban & Jellen, 1986) is one of the most used instruments for the assessment of creative potential. Few studies exist regarding its factorial structure, and all of them were limited to using an exploratory approach. The aim of this research was to assess the factorial structure of the TCT-DP (Form A) for undergraduate and postgraduate Portuguese students. Two studies were performed, where Study 1 (967 participants) consisted of an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) that yielded a 2-factor solution and Study 2 (920 participants) consisted of a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) used to test the fit and compare the suitability of the 2 factorial solutions with alternative models. The 2-factor model exhibited good and acceptable indices of fit. The factors represented Innovativeness and Adaptiveness. This model was called Two Tracks of Thought (TTT). Its structure suggests the importance of both non-conventional and conventional thinking for the creative process.     

Innovativeness and the effects of urbanization on risk-taking behaviors in wild Barbados birds

The effects of urbanization on avian cognition remain poorly understood. Risk-taking behaviors like boldness, neophobia and flight distance are thought to affect opportunism and innovativeness, and should also vary with urbanization. Here, we investigate variation in risk-taking behaviors in the field in an avian assemblage of nine species that forage together in Barbados and for which innovation rate is known from previous work. We predicted that birds from highly urbanized areas would show more risk-taking behavior than conspecifics from less urbanized parts of the island and that the differences would be strongest in the most innovative of the species. Overall, we found that urban birds are bolder, less neophobic and have shorter flight distances than their less urbanized conspecifics. Additionally, we detected between-species differences in the effect of urbanization on flight distance, more innovative species showing smaller differences in flight distance between areas. Our results suggest that, within successful urban colonizers, species differences in innovativeness may affect the way species change their risk-taking behaviors in response to the urban environment.     

Infusion of protein synthesis inhibitors in the entorhinal cortex blocks consolidation but not reconsolidation of object recognition memory

Memory consolidation and reconsolidation require the induction of protein synthesis in some areas of the brain. Here, we show that infusion of the protein synthesis inhibitors anisomycin, emetine and cycloheximide in the entorhinal cortex immediately but not 180 min or 360 min after training in an object recognition learning task hinders long-term memory retention without affecting short-term memory or behavioral performance. Inhibition of protein synthesis in the entorhinal cortex after memory reactivation involving either a combination of familiar and novel objects or two familiar objects does not affect retention. Our data suggest that protein synthesis in the entorhinal cortex is necessary early after training for consolidation of object recognition memory. However, inhibition of protein synthesis in this cortical region after memory retrieval does not seem to affect the stability of the recognition trace.     

Compliance, conversion, and category induction

When children hear an object referred to with a label that is moderately discrepant from its appearance, they frequently make inferences about that object consistent with the label rather than its appearance. We asked whether 3-year-olds actually believe these unexpected labels (i.e., conversion) or whether their inferences simply reflect a desire to comply with the considerable experimental demands of the induction task (i.e., compliance). Specifically, we asked how likely children would be to pass an unexpected label on to another person who had not been present during the labeling event. Results showed that children who used an unexpected label as the basis for inference passed that label on to another person about as often as they could remember it. This suggests that children’s label-based inferences do reflect conversion rather than mere compliance.     

MEASUREMENT ERROR IN RESEARCH ON HUMAN RESOURCES and FIRM PERFORMANCE: HOW MUCH ERROR IS THERE AND HOW DOES IT INFLUENCE EFFECT SIZE ESTIMATES?

Studies of the relationship between human resource (HR) practices and firm performance typically use a single respondent to assess firm level HR practices or HR effectiveness. However, previous research in other substantive areas suggests that rater differences are a potentially important source of measurement error. We demonstrate analytically the potential consequences of both random and systematic measurement error in research on HR and firm performance. However, our main focus is on random error and we show how generalizability theory can be applied to obtain better estimates of reliability by simultaneously recognizing multiple sources (e.g., items, raters) of random measurement error. These more inclusive reliability estimates, in turn, offer the possibility of more precisely quantifying substantive relationships in the HR and firm performance literature. In our sample, reliabilities (as estimated by generalizability coefficients) for single-rater assessments of HR variables were generally below .50. This degree of measurement error, if present in substantive studies on HR and firm performance, could lead to considerable bias, given that an unstandardized regression coefficient is corrected for measurement error in the independent variable by dividing by its reliability coefficient (not its square root). We also found only limited convergent validity between HR and line managers ratings of a second type of HR measure, HR effectiveness. In general, our findings suggest that future researchers need to devote greater attention to measurement error and construct validity issues. Our study provides an example of how generalizability theory can be useful in this pursuit.     

Duration discrimination of filled and empty auditory intervals: cognitive and perceptual factors.

Adult subjects were presented with two auditory stimuli per trial, and their task was to decide which of the two was longer in duration. An adaptive psychophysical procedure was used. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, the base duration was 50 msec, whereas in Experiment 3, the base duration was 1 sec. In Experiments 1, 2, and 4, it was found that filled intervals (continuous tones) were discriminated more accurately than empty intervals (with onset and offset marked by clicks). It was concluded that this difference was perceptual rather than cognitive in nature, since performance on filled and empty intervals was not affected by increasing cognitive load in a dual-task procedure (Experiment 2) but was affected by backward masking (Experiment 4). In contrast, the results of Experiment 3 showed that duration discrimination of filled auditory intervals of longer duration was cognitively influenced, since performance was impaired by increasing cognitive load. Implications for notions of perceptual processing and timing mechanism underlying differences in duration discrimination with filled and empty intervals are discussed.