Graduate Program

School Psychology

Degree Name

Specialist in School Psychology

Semester of Degree Completion

2016

Thesis Director

Gary L. Canivez

Abstract

Assessment of children’s learning behaviors is a method to inform academic skills development and create successful interventions (DiPerna, Volpe, & Elliott, 2001; Malecki & Elliott, 2002; Schaefer & McDermott, 1999). Learning behaviors are motivational and behavioral mechanisms that children use in order to be successful when engaging in learning tasks (McDermott et al., 2011). Learning behaviors are an research to address noncognitive factors of academic achievement. It is necessary that constructs a scale proposes to measure such skills is known. The present study investigated the factor structure of the Learning-to-Learn Scale (LTLS; McDermott et al., 2011). Analyses included item based exploratory factor analyses (higher-order EFA with Schmid-Leiman transformation; Schmid & Leiman, 1957) of item polychoric correlations for subjects with complete data (N = 277), and omega reliability estimates (Reise, 2012). Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) identified an oblique (correlated) four-factor model. However, through item association, the three-factor model was the most reasonable association. A second-order EFA was completed on the three-factor model along with a Schmid-Leiman transformation and found the majority of the apportioned variance was associated with the general model based scale dimension. This approximate bifactor result was used to estimate reliability (omega-hierarchical subscale) and indicated the second-order factor coefficient was .93, while the omega-hierarchical subscale coefficients for Planning and Sustained Motivation in Learning (PM), Vocal Engagement (VE), Interpersonal Responsiveness in Learning (IR) were .14, .27, and .16, respectively. Results suggested an approximate bifactor model with majority of the variance apportioned to a general Learning-to-Learn factor.

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