Ai Ye

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill | UNC · Institute for Trauma Recovery, Dept of Anesthesiology, School of Medicine

Substantive theory rarely provides specific enough information to guide our selection of the optimal model for longitudinal data. Instead, researchers are more likely to rely on models common to their field, even if they are not appropriate. The purpose of our study is to assess whether researchers can use overall goodness-of-fit measures from stru...

Structural equation models (SEMs) are widely used to handle multiequation systems that involve latent variables, multiple indicators, and measurement error. Maximum likelihood (ML) and diagonally weighted least squares (DWLS) dominate the estimation of SEMs with continuous or categorical endogenous variables, respectively. When a model is correctly...

There recently has been growing interest in the study of psychological and neurological processes at an individual level. One goal in such endeavors is to construct person-specific dynamic assessments using time series techniques such as Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models. However, two problems exist with current VAR specifications: (1) VAR models...

Recent years have demonstrated growing interest in the study of psychological and neurological processes at an individual level. One goal is to construct person-specific dynamic assessments using time series techniques such as Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models. However, two problems exist with current VAR specifications: 1) VAR models are restrict...

The present longitudinal study investigated the developmental trajectories of addition, subtraction, and multiplication fluency; their relationships to general cognitive functions; and potential interrelations between reading fluency and growth in arithmetic fluency for different operations. The central prediction was that measures of arithmetic fl...

The present study investigated the mediating role of career adaptability in the relationship between youth-perceived contextual support and positive youth development on the basis of a survey of 1,047 students in 10th to 12th grades. Measurement model analysis revealed that career search self-efficacy (CSSE), goal capacity, academic self-efficacy,...

Fraction magnitude understanding is linked to student achievement in mathematics, but the direction of the relation is not clear. To assess whether fraction magnitude knowledge and mathematics achievement develop in a bidirectional fashion, participants (N = 536) completed a standardized mathematics achievement test and two measures of fraction mag...

The present study investigated the development of fraction comparison strategies through a longitudinal analysis of children’s responses to a fraction comparison task in 4th through 6th grades (N = 394). Participants were asked to choose the larger value for 24 fraction pairs blocked by fraction type. Latent class analysis of performance over item...

The current study investigated the mediating role of number-related skills in the developmental relationship between early cog-nitive competencies and later fraction knowledge using structural equation modeling. Fifth-grade numerical skills (i.e., whole number line estimation, non-symbolic proportional reasoning, multiplication , and long division...

In order to address the pervasive trend of underconsumption of fruits and vegetables among children, we examined the hypothesis that children would be more likely to select fruits (apple slices, bananas, and oranges) and vegetables (baby carrots) when paired with animal cartoon image than when available without the character image. Tested in a rand...

Living on campus has consistently been shown to promote a variety of desirable student outcomes (Astin, 1993; Turley & Wadtke, 2012; Wang & Kennedy-Phillips, 2013). However, little is known about residential students’ psychological well-being, especially for students coming from underrepresented populations. The present study aims to establish a la...

Latent transition analysis (LTA) is a longitudinal variant of latent class analysis that allows researchers to analyze how individuals change between latent classes over time. In LTA models, one is often interested in relating latent class membership to auxiliary variables. However, empirical investigations of covariate inclusion methods for LTA ar...