An extension of the partial credit model with an application to the measurement of change

The partial credit model is considered under the assumption of a certain linear decomposition of the item × category parameters _ih into basic parameters _j. This model is referred to as the linear partial credit model. A conditional maximum likelihood algorithm for estimation of the j is presented, based on (a) recurrences for the combinatorial functions involved, and (b) using a quasi-Newton approach, the so-called Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) method; (a) guarantees numerically stable results, (b) avoids the direct computation of the Hesse matrix, yet produces a sequence of certain positive definite matricesB _k ,k=1, 2, ..., converging to the asymptotic variance-covariance matrix of the . The practicality of these numerical methods is demonstrated both by means of simulations and of an empirical application to the measurement of treatment effects in patients with psychosomatic disorders.The authors thank one anonymous reviewer for his constructive comments. Moreover, they thankfully acknowledge financial support by the Österreichische Nationalbank (Austrian National Bank) under Grant No. 3720.     

Teamwork makes the dream work: Testing for shared perceptions on psycho-behavioural skills between athletes,coaches and parents

Psycho-behavioural skills play a key role in optimising progression through talent development, and this study investigated to what extent athlete’s self-perceptions align with those of their coaches and parents. Firstly, we examined if levels of alignment between these three raters differ across age of the athlete. To this end, 122 athletes between 9 and 18 years old (12.17 ± 2.41 years old; 47 gymnasts, 13 cyclists and 62 badminton players) completed a psycho-behavioural questionnaire. The ANOVA’s indicated low levels of correspondence between the ratings of the athlete, the coach and the parents during childhood, while better levels of shared perceptions were found in adolescence. Secondly, we investigated to what extent coaches and parents believed their own perception of the athlete’s and the perception of the athlete’s psycho-behavioural skills were accurate. Parents appeared to be more confident in accurately perceiving the psycho-behavioural skills of the athlete than coaches. Parents and coaches also believed that older athletes would be more honest on their psycho-behavioural shortcomings than younger athletes. Altogether, these findings highlight that athletes and other stakeholders in the talent development environment should strive for better alignment in perceptions on psycho-behavioural skills during the talent development pathway. With better integrated perceptions, a more functional and efficient talent development system for the athlete targeting the psycho-behavioural skills can be created.     

Specific and general transfer of perceptual-motor skills and learning between sports: A systematic review

ObjectivesSport developmental models contend that participating in different sports promotes expertise development, implying positive skill transfer between sports. This study conceptualizes and examines how specific and general transfer occur and interact between sports in the short- (skill transfer) and long-term (learning transfer). Specific transfer is predicated on the perception and utilisation of specifying information in a transfer task, while general transfer relies on non-specifying, "general" information. Furthermore, the study examined how certain conditions (affordance similarity, perceptual-motor exploration and expertise) promote the transfer process.DesignSystematic literature review.MethodsAn electronic search was performed on SPORTDiscuss, Pubmed/MEDLINE, and Scopus. Studies were included if participants performed a transfer task in a sport different to the sport they learned a skill in.ResultsA total of 17 studies of low-to-moderate quality were included. Most studies showed specificity of transfer between sports with overlapping affordances and generality of transfer between sports with no overlapping affordances (for a given skill). Only 2 studies examined how perceptual-motor exploration supported specific transfer, and 2 examined transfer for (subsequent) learning with contrasting results. Six studies indicated an expertise effect, showing higher transfer in skilled vs less-skilled athletes.ConclusionsThis review provides a conceptualization of specificity and generality of transfer, and initial evidence on how transfer emerges between sports in the short-term. It provides little information on the general-specific interaction in the short-term, and does not provide any insights on how transfer emerges in mid- and long-term. As such, no inference regarding sport developmental models can be made. The low-to-moderate quality of the studies requires caution in interpreting these findings. We encourage future research to investigate general and specific transfer longitudinally, recruiting populations with different expertise levels to further advance our current understanding.     

Rasch's multiplicative poisson model with covariates

As a multivariate model of the number of events, Rasch's multiplicative Poisson model is extended such that the parameters for individuals in the prior gamma distribution have continuous covariates. The parameters for individuals are integrated out and the hyperparameters in the prior distribution are estimated by a numerical method separately from difficulty parameters that are treated as fixed parameters or random variables. In addition, a method is presented for estimating parameters in Rasch's model with missing values. The author is now affiliated with the Otara University of Commerce. The author is grateful to Yoshio Takane, Haruo Yanai, Eiji Muraki, the editor and referees for their careful readings and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. Part of this work was presented at the third European Congress of Psychology at Tampere, Finland in 1993.     

The relative law of effect: effects of shock intensity on response strength in multiple schedules

Key pecking of four birds was reinforced with food according to a two-component multiple variable-interval 1-minute variable-interval 4-minute schedule. In addition, key pecking was punished by a brief shock according to a variable-interval 30-second schedule during both components of the multiple schedule. The intensity of the shock was varied. For all birds, punishment had a stronger suppressive effect on the responding maintained by the leaner food schedule, and the ratio of responding during the two components of the multiple schedule became closer to the ratio of reinforcement as shock intensity was increased, as the relative law of effect predicts. At the higher shock intensity, there was some evidence that the ratio of responses overmatched the ratio of reinforcements.     

Warmup in avoidance as a function of time since prior training

On avoidance procedures, rats and pigeons typically show warmup effects, characterized by improving performance within sessions and loss of the improvement (“warmup decrement”) between sessions. Between-session losses were examined by varying the time between periods of avoidance training. In one experiment, rats lived fulltime in conditioning chambers while intermission intervals were varied. In a second experiment, the animals lived in home cages between sessions; timeout intervals were introduced at midession, producing recurrence of warmup in the second half-session. In both experiments, the warmup decrements increased substantially as the timeout or intersession intervals were increased from zero to 30 minutes. With intervals of 60 or 120 minutes, the decrements approached or exceeded those obtained with intervals of a day or more. When avoidance was interposed between appetitive sessions, the appetitive responding was disrupted, but this seemed unrelated to the warmup or to the proficiency of avoidance. The warmup in avoidance shares characteristics with transient punishment effects, with the Kamin effect, and with habituation phenomena, but it is premature to assume that they reflect common processes.     

A rating formulation for ordered response categories

A rating response mechanism for ordered categories, which is related to the traditional threshold formulation but distinctively different from it, is formulated. In addition to the subject and item parameters two other sets of parameters, which can be interpreted in terms of thresholds on a latent continuum and discriminations at the thresholds, are obtained. These parameters are identified with the category coefficients and the scoring function of the Rasch model for polychotomous responses in which the latent trait is assumed uni-dimensional. In the case where the threshold discriminations are equal, the scoring of successive categories by the familiar assignment of successive integers is justified. In the case where distances between thresholds are also equal, a simple pattern of category coefficients is shown to follow.This work was conducted in part in the first half of 1977 while the author was on study leave at the Danish Institute for Educational Research. The Institute provided required research facilities while The University of Western Australia provided financial support.     

Tests of symmetry in three-way contingency tables

Three-dimensional contingency tables are analyzed, with one variable (e.g., sex) as a factor, and with a natural relation between the other variables (e.g. left and right eye vision). Models of special interest, like symmetry and proportional symmetry between the related variables, and homogeneity across the factor levels, are investigated. Maximum likelihood estimators of parameters and partitions of chi-square goodness-of-fit statistics are explicitly presented; the independence of certain models is noted, and an example is discussed.     

Robust estimation of ability in the Rasch model

Estimating ability parameters in latent trait models in general, and in the Rasch model in particular is almost always hampered by noise in the data. This noise can be caused by guessing, inattention to easy questions, and other factors which are unrelated to ability. In this study several alternative formulations which attempt to deal with these problems without a reparameterization are tested through a Monte Carlo simulation. It was found that although no one of the tested schemes is uniformly superior to all others, a modified jackknife stood out as the best one in general, it was also super efficient (more efficient than the asymptotically optimal estimator) for tests with forty or fewer items. It is proposed that this sort of jackknifing scheme for estimating ability be considered for practical work.This research was funded through a grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (78-NI-AX-0047) to the Bureau of Social Science Research, Howard Wainer, Principal Investigator. We would like to thank Ronald Mead, Anne Morgan and James Ramsay for kind, generous, and invaluable help at various stages of the project.