Simple mental addition in children with and without mild mental retardation.

The speeded performance on simple mental addition problems of 6- and 7-year-old children with and without mild mental retardation is modeled from a person perspective and an item perspective. On the person side, it was found that a single cognitive dimension spanned the performance differences between the two ability groups. However, a discontinuity, or "jump," was observed in the performance of the normal ability group on the easier items. On the item side, the addition problems were almost perfectly ordered in difficulty according to their problem size. Differences in difficulty were explained by factors related to the difficulty of executing nonretrieval strategies. All findings were interpreted within the framework of Siegler's (e.g., R. S. Siegler & C. Shipley, 1995) model of children's strategy choices in arithmetic. Models from item response theory were used to test the hypotheses.     

The Development of a Brief Version of the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire

The increasing interest between religiosity and health benefits has created the need for a brief, reliable, valid, and practical instrument to measure strength of religious faith. The purpose of this study is to develop a brief version of the Santa Clara Strength of Religious Faith Questionnaire (SCSRFQ). The SCSRFQ has been reduced from a ten-item questionnaire to a five-item scale, making it more suitable for administration to severely ill patients and for use in large-scale epidemiological studies. To create the brief version, 1584 participants completed the SCSRFQ. Results were evaluated for high correlation coefficients between individual item responses and the overall total 10 questions from the original scale. Items to be used in the abbreviated version were also selected on the basis of having moderate and centered means and high standard deviations. Thus, the items selected for the brief version generally correlated highly with the total score for the longer questionnaire and provided adequate variability. The reduced version, using questions 2, 4, 5, 8, and 10 of the original scale provides a > 0.95 correlation with results from the longer version.